


Love Me Toxic

by blushmepink



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Amnesia, Angst, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Ben Solo is a Mess, F/M, Kylo Ren and Rey Are Not Related, Multi, Rey Needs A Hug, rich man/poor woman
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:34:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 30,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25651423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blushmepink/pseuds/blushmepink
Summary: She had been his dirty, little secret...the poor, unwanted ward of the housekeeper to the wealthy Organa-Solo Family and he their womanizing only child. They were from opposite ends of the social spectrum and he had kept her there, hiding their true relationship from the public. He had used her love for him as a means to end his boredom...a rich man's side bit. But everything changed when she disappeared after coming face-to-face with his gut-wrenching betrayal. Now five years later, and here, she was again, in the flesh, standing in front of him. He was being given a second chance and there was no stopping him this time...He would make her his again...forever...A second chance story filled with plenty of heartache and angst....(Inspired by Caitlin Crew's Unwrapping the Castelli Secret)
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 147
Kudos: 214





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back, y'all! I cannot stay away from the angst. Please enjoy and let me know what you guys think! Happy reading!

It was her! 

His Rey. 

The same girl who’d stalked off into the night, claiming she wanted nothing more than to get the hell away from him and their twisted relationship at last. Back then he’d laughed, so arrogantly certain she’d come back to him the way she always did. The way she’d been coming back to him since the day they’d first crossed that line when she’d turned nineteen.

Another quickie in a hall closet, perhaps, with his hand wrapped over her mouth to muffle her cries as they drove each other crazy only feet away from their families—his the wealthy clan that descended from royalty and hers their employee. Another stolen night in her bedroom in the detached servants' quarters, tearing each other apart in the stillness of the summer Hampton night, hands in fists and teeth clenched against the pillows. A motel room here, a stolen moment in the gardening shed there—all so tawdry, now, in his recollection. All so stupid and wasteful. But then, he’d been so certain there would always be another.

His cell vibrated in his pocket; the girlfriend he’d left behind at the cafe, he assumed, wondering where in the hell Ben was. Or perhaps even his oldest friend, Poe, irritated by Ben’s absence when there was important work to be done. Either way, he ignored it.

The afternoon was falling fast into evening and Ben was a different man now than the one he’d been five years ago. He had responsibilities these days—a welcome outlet. He couldn’t simply chase women across cities the way he had in his youth, though back then, of course, he’d done such things for entirely different reasons. Gluttony, not guilt. He was no longer the compulsive womanizer he’d been then, content to enjoy his secretive relationship with the housekeeper’s ward in private and all his other conquests in the bright glare of the public eye, never caring if that hurt her.

Never caring about much of anything at all, if he was honest, except keeping himself safe from the claws of emotional entanglements.

 _This is how it must be, sweetheart_ , he’d told her with all the offhanded certainty of the shallow, pleasure-seeking fool he’d been then. No one can ever know what happens between us. They wouldn’t understand.

He was no longer the selfish and twisted young man who had taken a certain delight in carrying on his shameful affair right under the noses of their ignorant families, simply because he could. Because Rey could not resist him.

The truth was, he’d been equally unable to resist her. A terrible reality he’d only understood when it was much too late.

He’d changed since those days. But he was still Benjamin Organa-Solo. And this was the very last time he intended to wallow in his guilt. It was time to grow up, accept that he could not change his past no matter how he wished it could be otherwise and stop imagining he saw a girl from his past around every corner.

But that walk.

It had been five years, but Ben knew that walk in an instant. He knew the swing of those hips and the stretch of those legs. That irresistible roll as she strode past the window where he stood. He caught the flash of her cheek, nothing more.

For a moment, he thought he’d lost her, and he knew that was the best possible outcome of this tired old madness—but then he saw her again, moving on the far side of the bustling city center with that gait that recalled Rey like a shout across the busy street, and that dark current of pure rage sparked in him all over again.

It wasn’t Rey. It was never Rey. And yet every time this happened, Ben raced after the poor stranger who looked a bit too much like his memories and made a goddamned fool of himself.

“This will be the last time you indulge this weakness,” he muttered to himself, and then he set out after this latest incarnation of the woman he doubted he’d ever see again.

One more time to stamp out the last spark of that nasty little flame of hope that still refused to die. One last time to prove what he already knew: Rey was gone, she was never coming back, and he would never, ever see her equal.

And maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t look for her in all these strangers’ faces if he hadn’t been such a bastard to her in the first place.

Ben doubted he’d ever shift the guilt of all he’d done from its usual place, congealed fat and greasy and bristling with malice in the spot where his soul should have been. But tonight, in this charming little town in a part of the UK he’d never visited before and likely wouldn’t visit again, he would lay what he could of his wretched history to rest.

He didn’t expect peace. He didn’t deserve it. But he was done chasing phantoms.

She will be a stranger. She is always a stranger.

_And after you confirm that for the hundredth time, you will never doubt it again._

This had to end. He had to end it.

He couldn’t see the face of his quarry, only the fine line of her back and the hint of her willowy form as she walked briskly away from him. She was wrapped up against the December chill in a long black coat and a bright scarf, with only hints of dark hair peeking out from beneath the black knit hat she wore tugged low over her ears. Her hands were thrust deep into her pockets. She was weaving her way through the crowds in a manner that suggested she knew exactly where she was going, and she didn’t look back.

And the memories rolled through him like waves against the rocks, crashing over him one after the next. Rey, the only woman who’d ever captured him so completely. Rey, whom he’d lost. Rey, his secret lover, his dirty passion, whom he’d hidden from the world and then had to feign indifference when she’d left the Organa-Solo compound with just the clothes on her back. As if she had been nothing more to him than the unwanted ward of the housekeeper.

He’d hated himself for so long now it was indistinguishable from that grief that never quite left him. That grief that had transformed him—turning him from a too-rich playboy who’d been content to throw his family money around rather than make any himself into one of the most formidable businessmen in the world.

That, too, had taken years. It had been another form of penance.

“Inside you is the seed of a far better man,” Rey had said to him the last time he’d seen her, after he’d made her come and then made her cry: his specialty. “I know it. But if you keep going the way you’re going, you’ll kill it off before it ever has a chance to grow.”

“You mistake me for someone who wants to grow,” Ben had replied with all that confidently lazy indifference he’d had no idea he’d spend the rest of his life hating himself for feeling. “I don’t need to be a fucking garden, Rey. I’m happy as I am.”

It was their last ever conversation.

The woman slowed that mesmerizing walk of hers, pulling her hand from her pocket and pointing a key fob at a nearby car. The alarm beeped as she stepped into the street and swung around to open the driver’s door, and the light from the street lamp just blooming to life above her caught her full in the face—

And hit him like a sucker punch to the gut.

There was a buzzing in his head, a dizzy, lurching thing that almost cut him in half. She jerked against the car door and left it shut, and he had the dim realization that he’d barked out some kind of order. Or had it been her name? She froze where she stood, staring back at him across the hood of a late model Mini, the frigid sidewalk, the whole of the night.

But there was no mistaking who she was.

Rey.

It could be no other. Not with those fine, sculpted cheekbones that perfectly framed her wide, carnal mouth that he’d tasted a thousand times. Not with that perfect face with its blemish-free complexion that rivaled the most beautiful of movie stars. Her eyes were still that stunning combination of gold and green. Her hair poked out from beneath her knit hat to tumble down to her shoulders, still that rich color resembling warm roasted chestnuts. 

He thought his heart might have dropped from his chest. He felt it plummet to the ground. He took a breath, then another, expecting her features to rearrange themselves into a stranger’s as he stared. Expecting to jolt awake somewhere to find this all a dream. Expecting something—

He dragged in a deep breath, then let it out. Another. And it was still her.

“Rey,” he whispered.

Then he was moving. He closed the distance between them in a moment, and there was nothing but noise inside him. A great din, pounding at him and tearing at him and ripping him apart, and his hands shook when he reached to take her by the shoulders. She made a startled sort of sound, but he was drinking her in, looking for signs. For evidence, like the sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose, to the little beauty mark on the left side of her lips and the adorable dent in her cheek when she smiled.

And his hands knew the shape of her shoulders even beneath that thick coat, slender yet strong. He had the sense of that easy fit he remembered, his body and hers, as if they’d been fashioned as puzzle pieces that interlocked. He recognized the way her head fell back, the way her lips parted.

“What are you doing?”

He saw her lips form the words, read them from her mouth, but he couldn’t make sense of them. He only knew that was her voice—her voice—the voice he’d long to hear again, faintly husky and indisputably Rey’s. It was like a sledgehammer through him, inside him. Wrecking him and remaking him at once.

And the scent of her, that indefinable fragrance that was some combination of hand lotion and moisturizer, shampoo and perfume, all rolled together and mixed with the simple truth of her beneath it all. All Rey. His Rey.

She was here. Or this was a psychotic break. And Ben didn’t care which.

He simply hauled her toward him and took her mouth with his.

She tasted the way she always had, like light. Like laughter. Like the deepest, darkest cravings and the heaviest need. He was careful at first, tasting her, testing her, his whole body exulting in this improbability, this thing he’d dreamed a thousand times only to wake up without her, again and again across whole years.

But then, the way it always had, that electric thing that arced between them shifted, blasted into heat lightning and took him whole. So he merely angled his head for that perfect fit he remembered so well and devoured her.

His lost love. His true love.

 _Finally_ , he thought. _At last._

His hands were in her hair, against her cheeks, when she jerked her mouth from his. Their breath mingled into another cloud between them. Her eyes were that impossible gold with glittering green flecks that had haunted him for half a decade.

“Where the hell have you been?” he grated out at her. “What are you doing here, of all places?”

“Let go of me.”

“What?” He didn’t understand.

“You seem very upset,” she said, in that voice that was etched into his soul, as much a part of him as his own. Her magnificent eyes were dark with something that looked like panic, which didn’t make any kind of sense. “But I need you to let me go. Right now. I promise I won’t call the police.”

“The police.” He couldn’t make any sense of this, and only partly because of that great buzzing still in his head. “Why would you call the police?”

Ben studied her, that lovely face he’d believed he’d never see again. There was heat on her cheeks now, staining them pink. Her mouth was slick from his. But she wasn’t melting against him the way she always had before at his slightest touch, and if he wasn’t entirely mistaken, the hands she’d lifted to his chest were pushing at him.

_At him._

As if, for the first time in almost as long as he’d known her, she was trying to push him away.

Everything in him rebelled, but he let her go. And he more than half expected her to disappear into the darkness drawing tight around them, or a plume of smoke, but she didn’t. She held his gaze for a long, cool moment, and then, very deliberately, she wiped her mouth with one hand.

Ben couldn’t define the thing that seared through him then, too bright and much too hot. He only knew it wasn’t the least bit civilized.

“What the hell is going on?” he demanded, in the voice he only ever had to use once with his staff. Never twice.

Rey stiffened, but she was still looking at him strangely. Too strangely.

“Please step back.” Her voice was low and intense with a posh British accent he was only just now noticing. “We might appear to be alone here, but I assure you, there are all kinds of people who will hear me scream.”

“Scream?” He felt chilled. Or dull. Or—but there were no words for the devastation inside him. There was nothing but need and fury, grief and despair. And that terrible hope he’d held on to all this time, though he’d known it was unhealthy. He’d known it was a weakness he could ill afford. He’d known it was sentimental and morbid.

He’d considered it the least of his penance. But she was here.

Rey was here. Standing in front of him.

“If you assault me again—”

But the fact she was standing here, on a side street in Yorkshire, made about as little sense to him as her disappearance had five years ago. He brushed aside whatever she was saying, scowling down at her as the haze began to recede and the shock of this eased. Slightly.

“Where have you been?” he demanded. “How did you end up here, of all places? Across the Atlantic?” Her words caught up with him and he blinked. “Did you say assault?”

He hadn’t imagined it. She edged away from him, one hand on the side of the car. Her gaze was dark and troubled, and she certainly hadn’t greeted him the way he might have expected Rey would—if, of course, he’d ever allowed himself to believe that she’d forgiven him.

Not a figment of his imagination this time. The real, flesh-and-blood Rey, standing before him on a cold, dark street.

And she was looking at him as if he was a monster.

“Why,” he asked, very softly, “are you looking at me as if you don’t know who I am?”

She frowned. “Because I don’t.”

Ben laughed, though it was a cracked and battered sort of sound.

“You don’t,” he repeated, as if he was sounding out the words. “You don’t know me.”

“I’m getting in my car now,” she told him, too carefully, as if he was some kind of wild animal or psychotic. “You should know that I have my hand on the emergency button on my phone. If you make another move toward me, I will—”

“Rey, stop this,” he ordered her, scowling. Or shaking. Or both.

“How do you know my name?” Her frown deepened. “We’ve never met before. Ever. Did you fall and hit your head? It’s very icy and they aren’t as good about putting down salt as they—”

“I did not hit my head and you are, in fact, Rey Smith,” he gritted out at her, though he wanted to shout it. To the goddamn world! “Do you imagine I wouldn’t recognize you? I’ve known you since you were twelve.”

“My name _is_ Rey Smith,” she replied, eyeing him as if he’d shouted after all, and perhaps in tongues. As he’d done any of the wild, dark things inside his head, none of which could be classified as remotely civilized. “You look like the kind of man people remember, but I’m afraid I don’t. I don’t know you, mate.”

“Rey—”

She moved back and opened the car door beside her, putting it between them. A barrier. A deliberate barrier. “I can call 999 for you. Maybe you’re hurt.”

“I know you, Rey Smith.” He threw it at her, but she didn’t react. She only gazed back at him with her too-bright eyes, and he realized he must have knocked that cap from her head when he’d kissed her so wildly, as her hair gleamed in the streetlight’s glow, a sable tangle. “You grew up outside Hanna City. You came to live with your mother’s cousin, our housekeeper, when you were twelve. Don’t you remember?”

She shook her head, which was better than that blank stare.

“You don’t like rollercoasters, close-talkers and raspberries. You tried being a vegetarian for three months but couldn’t say no to a cheeseburger. You have a small peace sign tattoo behind your right ear and a set of three stars on your left foot. A graduation present to yourself as well as an act of rebellion to Maz. You’ve got one year of MIT under your belt, studying to be a mechanical engineer before you disappeared. Do you think I’m making these things up to amuse myself?”

She shrugged, confusion narrowing her eyes slightly at the mention of her tattoos.

“You lost your virginity on your nineteenth birthday,” he threw at her, everything inside him a pitched and mighty roar. “To me. You might not remember it, but I fucking do. I’m the love of your goddamn life!”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, y'all. Please enjoy and let me know what you think!

Rey stood frozen on the spot—that kiss still thudding through her, setting her on fire in ways she’d never expected. _The love of her life?_ She doubted that very much! Even if her body had sensed a vague familiarity in his kiss.

 _Who was this man?_ He was a stranger and yet...there was something about him that brought flashes of physical memories, her brain alight with images from her past. Memories that she’d long thought unattainable. She’d had a flicker of recognition—a heavily muscled form in a sleek and extraordinarily well-cut black coat, his arrestingly attractive face flushed with passion and then with rage...in various stages of dress...and undress. 

He was an unconventionally handsome man from the thick, dark hair that flowed over his ears—and that stunned, haunted, wondering look in his searing dark gaze. But then her brain blanked again. She still had no recollection of anything from five years before. Before waking up in that sterile hospital room.

“Should I go on?” Ben asked in a tone of voice she sent a shiver down her spine. Hard, uncompromising. Very nearly ruthless. It should have scared her, and she told herself it did, but what shuddered through her was far more complicated than that as it pooled hot and deep in her belly. Lower. “I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the things I know about you. I could write a book.”

“It would be a work of fiction, then,” she managed to say now. “If you wrote a book. Because I do not know you.”

His face changed, then. That haunted expression dimmed, and something far more considering gleamed gold there in the depths of his dark gaze.

“My apologies,” he said softly. 

She felt how dangerous it would be to believe that tone in the goosebumps that prickled all over her, though she kept herself from shivering in reaction. Barely. 

“You are _a_ Rey Smith, however? R-e-y?”

She hoped her face remained unreadable even as her hopes and fears coalesced into a maelstrom of epic proportions. What were the odds that he knew the unique spelling of her name? Still, she refused to give an inch.

“I’m not sure I want to share my personal information with some random stranger on the street.” 

“I am Ben Organa-Solo,” he said, and the way he said his name lilted through her like a song, lyrical and right. “If you don’t know me, as you claim, the pertinent details would be these—I am the only son of Han Organa-Solo and heir to the ancient Organa-Solo fortune. I am acting CEO of Organa-Solo Internationals, renowned the world over for my business acumen. I do not hunt women down in the streets. I do not have to do such things.”

“Because rich men are so well-known for their reasonable behavior.” She snorted at his arrogance.

“Because if I was in the habit of accosting strange women in the street, it would have been noted before now,” he said dryly. “I suspect countries would think twice before letting me cross their borders. I am a well-known public figure so you may google me if you wish.”

Rey shifted and wondered if she should reveal her amnesia. But she didn’t trust the man...there was something about him that did not sit well with her. “I really think I should call 999,” she murmured. “You’re not making any sense.”

“There is no need,” he said in a voice so velvety smooth and deep it made everything inside her feel edgy. Jagged. That and the tightness of his lean jaw were the only hints she could see of his anger, but she sensed it was there. She could feel it. “I know who you are even if you pretend to not know me.”

“Why would I pretend?”

“I do not know nor do I know why you’ve been missing for five years, Rey.”

_Missing? But no one had ever come to find her whereabouts at the hospital..._

“Did I leave intentionally or was I kidnapped?” _Were you searching for me?_

That brought Ben up short, the first inkling of uncertainty creeping into his mind. “Kidnapped? No. You left your home all on your own.”

“My home? Did my parents look for me?” A tiny flicker of hope unfurled in her chest.

“You have no parents, Rey. They died before you came to live with us.”

An orphan. Of course. Somehow, knowing that was not a huge blow to her—not much of revelation. She’d always felt a sense of loneliness. Of being alone. Abandoned. Unwanted.

“You say I lived with you...to what capacity?” _Were we living together? As a couple?_

He actually flushed, looking away guiltily before turning his dark gaze back to her. “When you were twelve, you were sent to live with Maz...our housekeeper. In our main property in Hanna City.”

Though their paths hadn’t really crossed until she turned sixteen. Before that, Rey had been a mere shadow in the large family compound while Ben had spent his days after graduation acting the rich bachelor. He’d been twenty-one to her twelve and was rarely in Hanna City anyway. L.A...Miami Beach...Monaco were more his scene while he’d enjoyed all the privileges—and attention from all the beautiful women—that came with being wealthy. He’d had no time for a scrawny kid no one wanted. 

“I see...so I was the help while you were the owner, is that it?” She couldn’t keep the derision out of her tone.

His jaw clenched but he nodded in agreement.

“So I wasn’t kidnapped...and I left of my own accord?”

“Yes,” Ben wondered where she was going with her line of questioning.

“If I left on my own, maybe I didn’t want to be found. Do I have other family? Siblings? An aunt?”

“No, your only relative...uh, Maz had just died…”

“If you were the love of my life...why am I only just seeing you now?”

Rey could almost see the wheels turning in his head as he searched for an answer. But that was enough of an answer for Rey. _She_ hadn’t been the love of _his_ life. So much for finding an answer for her life before she came to live in Yorkshire. It would remain a mystery.

“I have to go.”

He reached out a hand and wrapped it over the top of her car door as if he intended to keep her there simply by holding the vehicle itself in place. Given his large stature, he probably could.

“There is no way in hell I’m letting you out of my sight.” _Not after I’ve found you at last._

She tipped her head back to meet his gaze, and was consumed by a feeling of pure euphoria followed instantly by a sharp pain in her chest. Then it was gone. “Why?”

“You have people who care about you.” Ben’s shrug seemed far more lethal than hers, a weapon more than a gesture. “There are legal issues. If you are not the woman I swear you are, prove it.”

“Or,” she said. “You can release my car and let me go on my merry way. I do not know you from Adam nor do I want to!”

“I have proof! You _are_ Rey Smith from Hanna City.”

Rey stared up at him, a war raging inside that she fervently hoped wasn’t visible on her face. He had to leave. He had to. There was no other option. He was triggering long-dormant memories and she didn’t like it! She didn’t like _him_! This man who stood before her, radiating a kind of authority she really didn’t want to investigate any further, no matter how linked he was to her past.

“Listen. I’ve been more than nice, considering the fact you grabbed me, terrified me and—”

“Was that terror I tasted on your tongue?” His voice was like silk. It slid over her, through her, demolishing what few defenses she had in an instant. “I rather thought it was something else.”

“Step away from this car,” she ordered him. She couldn’t let herself react. She couldn’t let him see that he got under her skin. “I’m going to get in it and drive away, and you’re going to let me.”

“Not one of those things is going to happen.”

“What do you want?” she hurled at him. “I told you I don’t know who you are!”

“I want the last five years of my life back!” he thundered, his voice a loud, dark thing in the quiet of the street, bouncing back from the walls of the surrounding buildings and making Rey feel flattened. Punctured. 

“I want you. I’ve been chasing your ghost for half a decade.”

“I’m not—”

“You left me.” The whisper was far more painful and powerful than a shout. It punched through her, leaving her winded. Wobbly. “You just got up and left in the middle of the night. No note. No text. No phone call. Nothing. You just disappeared after Maz’s funeral.” 

His fine lips pressed together, hard and grim. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “I wanted to search for you but, apparently your lawyer had contacted Dad regarding Maz’s will so he didn’t think anything was wrong. You were going to MIT, you had some money from Maz and you had no ties to us anymore.”

His eyes turned accusing. “But I knew something wasn’t right. You never returned to MIT. You didn’t even come back for your things….you just left.”

“I’m sorry,” she managed to say. “But I don’t remember any of this.”

“You are lying. All I hear are lies from your lips.” He was too intense. His gaze was too penetrating. She was terribly afraid he could see something she didn’t know herself. “What I can’t understand is how you imagine you can tell them to my face. I’ve never known you to be a liar, Rey.”

“You’re mistaken, mate. I. Do. Not. Know. You.”

He really smiled then, so bright and carefree he could have lit up the whole of Europe if he’d wanted. This one was hard. Focused. Determined—and still it echoed deep inside her like a touch. 

She was so busy telling herself that he was wrong—he had to be!—that she didn’t realize his intention until it was too late. His hand was on her too quickly, his fingers brushing over her temple, and Rey didn’t know how to react as sensation seared through her.

“Get your hand off me right now,” she gritted out, frozen from his touch. Still from head to toe. She didn’t think she could move if she’d wanted to, she was so rooted to the ground in what she told herself was outrage. She could feel his touch everywhere.

Everywhere. Hot and right and perfect. As if all these years she’d been stumbling around in the cold black-and-white dark without him. And she hadn’t even known it!

This was heat. This was color and light and—

This is dangerous! everything inside her shrieked in belated alarm. As if her subconscious was telling her to be afraid. To be very afraid.

“You got this scar jet skiing in the Atlantic the summer you turned nineteen,” he murmured, his voice pitched low, as if those were words of love or sex instead of accusation as he traced the tiny mark she’d never paid any mind to. Up, then down. The effect was hypnotic.

“You swerved to avoid hitting some reckless frat boys. You were lucky you didn’t kill yourself when your head hit the side of the jet ski. But you were bleeding when you came back to the house and we were so worried.”

He moved closer, those dark eyes of his intense and moody, focused on that little scar she didn’t even see when she looked at herself. And she remained paralyzed—suspended between the need to run screaming into the street and the desire to stay right where she was. 

But she still didn’t move.

“And I had to make the sarcastic remarks of the indifferent owner’s son,” Ben said gruffly. “Playing it off for our families. Until later.”

Rey blinked. Images of a shower. Steam. Ben shouldering his way into the glass-surround stall still fully dressed, his mouth grim and a harsh light in his beautiful eyes. Then his mouth on hers, his large hands slicking over the curve of her hips. Ben dispensing with his wet trousers, picking her up and surging deep inside her with one slick, sure thrust.

 _“Don’t ever scare me like that again,”_

The words reverberating through her mind...words from her past. 

“Do you remember, Rey...? Do you remember how I fucked you in the shower? I made you come there...then again three more times in your bed?"

“I’m not her.”

“Don’t lie to me. I see it in your eyes...you remember me...you remember that night.” It wasn’t a question but a statement made without any doubt of who _she_ was.

Rey didn’t know what might have happened then. They were at a stalemate and she had no idea how to extricate herself from this—but then she heard voices calling from across the street. 

For both of them.

The man beside her didn’t move a muscle as Poe and Kaydel approached him but it was the older woman who held his attention now. The reason for his even being here. His mother...his estranged mother. 

“Leia—”

“Hello, Mother.”

Rey gasped, raising shocked eyes to Ben. How could Leia, her savior, be related to this giant? Leia who had rescued her from that hospital bed, throwing Rey a life-line as her live-in companion/assistant all those years ago. She had followed Leia to the UK, the two becoming close as their relationship grew from employer/employee to something akin to mother and daughter. Of course Leia had mentioned a son but how could Rey have known that he was a link to her past. A past her distraught mind had refused to acknowledge…had refused to remember.

“Damn it, Ben! Answer your phone next time, will you?” Poe Dameron glared at his friend before turning his Latin charm to the lovely Rey.

Leia made the introductions, forcing Rey to turn away from her car.

“And how do you know each other?” Kaydel inserted herself between Rey and Ben, her eyes shooting a warning to the other woman.

“It’s none of your business, Kaydel.” Ben said curtly. 

“He thought I was someone from his past.” Rey answered.

“Your past, dear? Do you remember something?” Leia led them towards a nearby pub, placing a reassuring arm on her elbow.

“Remember? Are you saying Rey doesn’t remember—”

“She has no memory of her life before a car accident five years ago.” Leia explained. “I found her lying in the road in Northern France.”

“I hope that clears things up for you,” Rey said, looking pointedly at Ben from across the dining table. “I am a Brit, according to my passport and my accent. So how could I possibly be _the_ Rey Smith that lived in Hanna City?”

Ben’s voice was mild. “Questions only lead to more questions. You’ve been living here for some time, clearly. You’ve made yourself part of this community. You know my mother coincidentally.” His expression was harsh. Something like unforgiving. 

He thought she was faking her amnesia. The audacity of the man! And yet, even though she did not know him, Rey couldn’t say she was surprised by his behavior. He didn’t seem the type to ever be questioned by anyone, much less his supposed former employee...or whatever his relationship with this _other_ Rey had been. 

His dark gaze was so intent, so absolutely certain, that it took her breath away. And it was far harder than it should have been to simply sit there. To do nothing. To keep herself from breaking eye contact, lest he doubted her amnesia.

Not that he appeared to be in any doubt about her identity. 

“I thought you were here to see me, Ben? It’s been a long time, darling.” Leia looked between the two, her eyes slight guarded. “I’ve missed you,”

“Yes, Mother.” 

Rey allowed the conversation to flow around her during dinner, her feelings in a tumultuous uproar. Six months after waking up from her coma, she’d waited for someone to acknowledge her—a parent, an uncle, a cousin, the mailman—anyone! but no one ever had. After those initial six months, day by day, her hope of her memory coming back had dwindled little by little. Of course, she’d thought that if someone from her past had ever identified her, she would’ve been ecstatic, happy. But she felt quite the opposite. She did not want this rich playboy to be the answer to her amnesia. She did not like that she’d obviously had an intimate relationship with him either. 

A feeling of emotional filth encompassed her then, leaving her feeling dirty..sullied...unclean. And she knew it had everything to do with Benjamin Organa-Solo. What had happened between them five years ago? Did she really want to know?

“You really don’t remember Ben, Rey?” Poe turned the attention back to her.

Rey shook her head, sipping her after-dinner coffee. 

“That must hurt your ego, huh, Benny?” Poe smirked good-naturedly. “But, hey, there has to be a first time for everything.”

“Were you an heiress, Rey? Ben mainly associates with people from the same social class as him.” _And me._ Kaydel arched a brow, her expression one of condescension.

“I highly doubt that.” Rey said dryly. “I am not an heiress.”

“I agree. You do not strike me as a lonely little heiress.” Poe flirted.

No, Ben thought in self-loathing. The poor little rich kid had been the bored, debauched party boy Ben, beloved of famous—and infamous—actresses, wealthy socialites and a host of models. Those had been the women he’d paraded around with in public. Those had been the women he’d brought home with him, the women he’d introduced as his girlfriend even though they’d never lasted longer than a few months. Women Rey had had to cater to as part of her job description. It had been a different woman every week that long-ago summer holiday. For three long months, he’d purposefully taunted Rey, letting them drape their cosmetically enhanced bodies all over him and then making her admit her jealousy before he’d ease her pain a little with his clever fingers, that awful mouth of his and the things he could do with a few stolen moments against a locked door. 

“You are her...my...ah...the Rey Smith that lived in our household since the age of twelve.” Ben was adamant.

“I will talk to your father and find out the truth.” Leia insisted, her face stoic as she sensed the underlying guilt in her son. Despite the years that had separated them, she was still his mother and she knew that he was holding his temper in check...barely. Speaking with her estranged husband was another story. It had been years since they’d spoken and even longer since they’d even been in the same room. But for Rey, Leia would put her hate and pride aside to deal with Han.

***

Ben broke things off with Kaydel that very night before they’d even reached the hotel. His expression was one of boredom as he let her rant and rave and curse him at him for stringing her along for three months. When finally, she’d checked out of her suite, Ben was able to breathe a sigh of relief. He facetimed his father next and imparted his evening with Leia as well as the reappearance of Rey.

“Do you believe she truly has amnesia?” Han asked, his old but still-handsome face wrinkled in concern. “It sounds like something out of a telenovela...you are certain this is Rey?”

“There is no doubt about that whatsoever.” 

He’d known it was Rey the moment he’d seen her walk past his line of vision. All the rest was mere confirmation of a truth he already knew, and the taste of her in his mouth after much too long.

Han stared at him for a moment. “I’m sorry that I didn’t try harder, son. But I really thought she’d left to go live her life...to start her adult life. It never occurred to me that someone was wrong. Your worry...seemed more than just mere concern for a former house maid. You altered the whole of your life afterward, very much as if…”

Ben only stared back at his father, brows raised in challenge, daring him to finish that sentence. He didn’t know what Han saw on his face, but the older man only nodded.

“If she is faking this memory loss,” Han said. “why? What was she doing in France in the first place?”

Ben had no answer. At first, he’d thought she’d been faking her memory loss but after seeing his mother...he knew Rey was indeed suffering from amnesia. But France? Why had she left to go to France of all places? The girl he knew had never spoke of traveling—

But the truth is, you don’t know her at all, a dark little voice inside him whispered harshly. Because the girl you knew would never have walked away from you.

“We have a responsibility, as the closest thing Rey has left to any kind of family, to determine that she is not suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress brought on by the accident,” Ben said. “At the very least.”

The words came so easily to him, when deep down, he knew they were excuses. Rey was found. That meant he would do whatever he must to claim her the way he should have done five years ago.

But he didn’t want to say that to his father. Not yet.

It was all for the best, he thought, that Han did not respond.

Ending their call, Ben took his time reading through emails and catching up on his work for the next few hours. Though his mind did travel back to the first time he’d ever set eyes on a young Rey Smith. The twelve-year-old had stayed hidden behind Maz in her clean but cheap clothing, her skinny body covered in bruises and scrapes from what—Ben didn’t know nor had he cared at the time. 

Over the years, he’d catch her tinkering in the garage. Instead of reprimanding her, he’d taken a few moments to talk to her, to show her the new toy he’d just purchased, inadvertently showering her with much-needed attention. Attention the lonely, unwanted young girl had never received in her life. To her, he’d been her very own archangel...beautiful, sexy, masculine. She’d idolized him at age twelve, relishing the attention he’d bestowed on her, basking in his praise at her stellar report cards, and cherishing every small trinket he’d gifted her on birthdays and Christmases. While to him, she’d just been the unwanted ward of the very elderly Maz. She was a kid so he couldn’t much just kick her to the curb when she’d come looking for him. Not when he knew she adored him. 

Of course, she didn’t know that those gifts had come from a celebrity swag bag...some unwanted thing that his girlfriend-of-the-moment hadn’t wanted. Re-gifts, hand-me-downs...not that Rey had ever known them for what they were. But something had changed when she’d turn eighteen, over a year since he’d last seen her.

The openly adoring young girl had been replaced by a cool, aloof young woman. Someone who looked through him even as she completed her duties as Maz’s helper. She no longer trailed after him when he visited Han at the family estate. She no longer spent time in the garage as his assistant, chattering about her classes and other things teen girls were interested in. 

For the first time in his life, Ben had actively searched her out, finding her on her day off ready to go out. He’d teased her about needing a chaperone, hoping to get back to the friendly camaraderie they’d had previously.

But Rey had turned to face him, that lovely face of hers still faintly rounded with youth, those impossible eyes scornful. She’d been dressed in a perfectly appropriate sundress that revealed nothing of the feminine frame underneath and yet there had been something about the way she’d worn the thick hair in three little

buns that showed off her model-worthy cheekbones, or the fact that her shoulders were far too smooth, that had made Ben wonder what it would be like to touch her—

He’d been horrified.

“I don’t need an older brother figure,” she’d told him baldly, compounding his shock at the direction of his own thoughts. “I don’t want the unsolicited advice, especially from someone like you.”

“Someone like me?”

“Someone who dates people purely to end up on TMZ, which I’m sure keeps you super relevant in the world of the vapid and the rich. Congrats.”

She’d turned away, her manner clearly dismissive, but Ben had not been accustomed to being dismissed. Especially not by teenage girls who were usually much more apt to follow him around and giggle. He hadn’t been able to imagine Rey Smith doing anything of the sort.

“So,” he’d said, “you’ve developed a hatred for the wealthy?”

She’d heaved a sigh but hadn’t looked at him again. “Only those who don’t earn it. Never worked for it.”

“I couldn’t possibly make my family any richer than we already are, Rey. Besides, wouldn’t that just make me greedy?” He’d only smirked when she’d looked back at him then, her nose wrinkled as if he was more than a little distasteful. “It’s not my fault that I was born into this. Besides, I’d rather play than work, Rey. And I play to win...whatever I want, I get. Always.”

Leaning back into his chair now, Ben still didn’t know why he’d said that. Had he known then? Had he suspected what was to come? Rey had hated him openly and happily from then on, which had distinguished her from pretty much every other woman on the planet. She’d insulted him, laughed at him, mocked him and dismissed him a thousand times. He’d told himself she was obnoxious. He’d told himself she was jealous.

“She is unbearable,” he’d growled at Armitage Huxley once, when Rey had spent a vacation going above and beyond in her maids’ duties by alphabetizing his vast condom collection.

“She’s just being organized.” His friend had laughed.

And then had come that fateful party at the summer home in the Hamptons. Ben had perhaps had too much of the Dom Perignon. He’d long told himself he was simply drunk and she must have been, too, but he’d had five long years thinking she was gone and had admitted to himself that he hadn’t been anything like drunk. He’d known exactly what he’d been doing when she’d sauntered past him in the kitchen, heading towards her room in the servants’ quarters. She’d had the night off to celebrate her nineteenth birthday, dressed in a skimpy black dress and too-high heels. Her hair had been left down for a change, falling into loose waves around her beautiful face. The scent of her, a citrus vanilla, had been maddening.

“If you’re looking for Bazine,” she’d said, and had managed to make his then girlfriend’s ridiculous name sound like an insult, “I very much doubt she’d be here in the kitchen. Botox and champagne is more her diet.” She’d smirked at him. “You’re favorite, right?”

Ben had known that the last thing in the world he should have done was reach over, slide his palm around her neck and yank that smart mouth to his. Of course he’d known. He’d imagined he would kiss her, she would punch him and he would laugh at her and tell her that if she wasn’t angling to take Bazine’s place, she should keep quiet.

But one touch of her mouth with his, and everything had changed.

Everything.

And you ruined it, he told himself savagely then, his eyes squeezing shut even as a sharp pain of regret pierced his heart. Because that is what you do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and kudos are much appreciated! Tell me what you think so far!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, readers. Here is a quick update and some clear-up in case there is any confusion. Ben finds Rey five years after she went "missing". Rey has amnesia. She was saved by Leia who has been estranged from Ben and Han for at least ten years so well before Rey came to live with Maz. Rey did have a UK passport with her (she grew up in the UK before going to live with Maz in the States), she lost her phone in the accident and, while Leia and Rey did try to find answers in the UK (because that's where they thought she resided), they did not find any clue as to her identity besides her name. Hope that clears up some things and keep in mind, this is fiction so please stretch your imagination...haha. Happy reading!

_There was no finesse. No gentility or politeness. Only simple, potent greed._

_He took what he wanted, a bold mating of lips and tongues. He tasted her, he took her, providing a comprehensive example of precisely the kind of demands he meant._

_He didn’t go easy on her at all._

_And she met him, his Rey. She twined herself around him, and the fire of it roared through him. The gut punch, hot and mad, slammed into him. It made him question the limits of his own control, when he prided himself on never, ever losing his grip—_

_When he pulled away, his own breath was hard to catch. Her eyes had gone dark and wide, and Ben wanted nothing on this earth but to bury himself inside her, again and again._

_Sweet and salt, all woman, and he thought it entirely possible that she might be the undoing of him, after all._

_The mad part of it was, he couldn’t seem to care._

_“Tell me to stop now, Rey,” he said, his voice rough with passion. Because he was talking to himself. “If you do not want this, tell me to stop.”_

_“Do you want me to stop, Ben?” she asked huskily._

_His thumb trembled over her full, tempting lower lip. He wanted to sink his teeth into her. He wanted to breathe her in, then get his mouth where she was sweetest._

_“No...but it’s not my decision to make, Rey.”_

_He watched her chest rise, then fall. He could see her nipples, tight and hard beneath the thin fabric of her dress. He caught the faintest hint of her arousal and his mouth watered._

_“Don’t stop, Ben. Please.”_

_He smiled then, edgy and wrong, and had the distinct pleasure of watching goosebumps break out all over her body._

_When all she did was pant a little, her eyes glazed over with heat when he angled himself back to look at her, he laughed._

_And then he took by the hand this woman who he intended to purge tonight, one way or the other. He led her out of the dark kitchen and back towards her room._

_Then he kissed her again, barely getting the door closed before his mouth was on hers._

_Dark. Hot._

_So greedy it almost hurt._

_And there was some part of her that couldn’t quite believe that this man who she’d desired since puberty, could carry all this passion within him. For her. That he had wanted—did want her. Just as much as she wanted him. And loved him._

_But she couldn’t think about that now. Not when his mouth was on hers and his hands roamed everywhere, finding her breasts and then taking possession of her nipples._

_As if they were his._

_As if she was his._

_But his mouth was still on hers, beguiling her and bewildering her, and she stopped worrying about where they were. Only that he was with her._

_Ben’s hands were restless, moving where they pleased. One dove beneath the hemline of her skirt to find the curve of her bottom. The other drifted to her waist, then up, pushing her bra out of his way to hold her naked breast in his palm._

_All the while he kissed her, intoxicating her. Making her press into him. Making her wish she could crawl inside him._

_She had never understood the word demanding before. Not really._

_Ben was overwhelming during the day. But here, unleashed..._

_He was like a hurricane._

_He kissed her with a ferocity that should have terrified her. That might have, if it hadn’t been for the sensation that howled and shook through her with every stroke of his hand, his tongue. She felt strung out between his taste and his touch. The insistent fingers on her breast and then, below, the way he traced his way over her ass. And kept going until he found his way to her front, and the furrow of her molten heat._

_And then he was inside her, two fingers deep into the center of her need._

_A wicked twist, and then more of that unreal dark laughter against her mouth as she bucked into him. And moaned._

_“My name,” he murmured._

_Another demand._

_Then he pressed down hard, thrusting deep, and Rey dissolved._

_She heard a keening sound, but all she was conscious of were those thick, strong fingers inside of her—thrusting so wickedly, with such certainty and skill._

_She sank from one peak only to find herself tossed up hard into another._

_And all the while, Ben laughed._

_Low, male, deeply satisfied._

_But still, it was laughter. And Rey wanted to hoard it. The sound so sinfully decadent and undeniably genuine._

_He pulled his fingers from the tight grip of her sex. Then, impossibly, he lifted them to his own mouth._

_Rey watched, torn somewhere between a sharp, hot longing and a crisp embarrassment as he licked his fingers clean._

_“All this time.” His voice was a wondering rasp. “All this time you dusted and cleaned my room. You served me breakfast and lunch. And all this time, you have tasted like this.”_

_She felt as if she ought to apologize, though she couldn’t quite speak. And her heart felt fragile and fierce at once, there where it swelled behind her ribs. Ben peeled her away from the wall and her knees wobbled beneath her when she meant to stand._

_Her reward for that was that dark laugh of his again, a rough, masculine music she thought she would hear inside her forever._

_Then he picked her up, tossing her over his shoulder with an easy strength that reminded her_ _how much smaller she was compared to his massive, masculine frame._

_He strode through her tiny living quarters, towards her bed._

_And when he put her down, he tipped her over onto her belly. Rey tried to orient herself to the dimness of her room, taking longer than she should have to recognize that he’d bent her over the side of the bed. And she tried to take stock, she did—but her body was his now. Not hers._

_Never again yours, a voice said in her so clearly she almost flinched at the sound. His always. His forever._

_And she could no longer tell if she was shuddering because of that voice, or because of him. Or some wicked, ruthless combination of both._

_She felt him behind her, crouched down with a hand on one ankle, and all she could manage to do was moan._

_“These legs,” he said, in that same tone, like a dark incantation. “I worked so hard to keep myself from noticing these legs, Rey. The temptation of them. Everyday your shorts just got shorter._ _And tonight...in these stripper shoes...have mercy.”_

_And all she could think was, You weren’t invisible to him after all. He did notice you as a woman..._

_She almost felt herself shatter into pieces at that notion alone._

_And then she was shivering all over, everywhere, as he slid his palms up the back of her legs. Not quite gently. Not quite softly. And the firm pressure was all about heat and want, making her delirious. Making her ripe and half-mad with that drumming desire._

_It was only when he slid his hands down the length of her legs again that she realized he’d pushed up her skirt and left it bunched up at her waist._

_She felt a wallop of that bright hot pulsing thing that had nearly knocked her over when he'd first touched her. It was mixed now with the image of what she must look like, bent over the bed in such a wanton display, with only the black lacy thong she wore between them._

_Rey was breathing so hard now, high and wild._

_“Feel free to bite down on the pillows,” Ben told her, dark and amused. “I won’t tell but do try to be quiet.”_

_She didn’t bite down. But she did grip the soft sheets beneath her, twisting the material into fists._

_His fingers moved beneath her thong, almost absently, when she could feel the intensity coming off of him in waves. She felt him peel it down her leg, then tug it from one ankle. But not the other, and she understood—with another wallop—that he’d left her thong there._

_How must she look...?_

_She was naked from the waist down, wearing only her impractical heels with her lacy black thong at one ankle. And she was making that sound. And his shoulders were between her legs, tipping her forward even more and lifting her at the same time, so she was braced even more fully on the bed—_

_“Oh, God,” she moaned, as understanding slammed into her with all the force of a train._

_“There you go,” he murmured._

_Approvingly._

_And she could hear him well enough, but worse—or better—his mouth was right there. Right there at her core, where she felt herself clenching, melting, shuddering—_

_Then Ben took her in his mouth from behind, like an overripe peach._

_And ate her like dessert._

_And this time, when she exploded, she screamed. Right into the pillow._

_Sometime later, he rolled her over. Rey lay there, splayed wide, because she couldn’t seem to get her limbs to work. Nor could she manage to care about that strange paralysis the way she knew she should._

_All the while her heart clattered so hard against her ribs that she was worried they might crack. Or she would._

_She had the vague sense that he was moving, but then he was touching her again. Stripping her, she worked out after a moment, with a ruthless efficiency that made her shiver all over again._

_“Ben...” she murmured._

_“Good girl,” he replied._

_She had no idea why that made her want to sob. Though she couldn’t have said, if her life depended upon it, what sort of sob that might have been. Another explosion of sensation. Or a deep well of something that had ached inside her for much too long now, too fiercely to be sadness._

_All of the above, she said to herself._

_At least, she thought it was to herself. It was impossible to tell._

_And then he was crawling over her, tasting her as he went._

_No part of her was safe from him, and she felt blazingly hot. Gloriously alight and alive. She tasted him too, so male and hard. Until she was sure they both glowed in the dark with the force of this endless temptation, wild and needy._

_She wanted it to go on and on forever._

_And then she felt him, hard and huge against her hip._

_She realized she must have made a noise when he laughed again, softly._

_“You’re going to take all of me, Rey,” he told her, with that quiet certainty that made her doubt—not for the first time—that she was really going to survive this. Not in one piece, anyway. Not intact._

_“Do you understand?”_

_All Rey could do was nod. She didn’t know if she was apprehensive, or desperate—but this time, in a whole new way. She wanted to prove to him that she could do exactly that. That she could do whatever he wanted, whatever he needed._

_He smiled again, and it was even more devastating than before._

_And she was such a fool. Had she really worried that the sight of his smile might make her swoon?_

_If only._

_The sad truth of her situation was like another wallop, and now it was connected to that molten fire between her legs, the pounding of her heart, and the dark, demanding man propped up over her._

_She had fallen hopelessly in love with this man when she was sixteen years old. She had loved him with all the mad fervency of a teenage girl, because she’d been one. And more, with the unwavering passion a girl could only have for the only person to have ever talked to her, listened to her. Her adoration for him, despite her coolness towards him this past year, remained._

_Her desire...her adoration...her passion for him. It had never wavered. Over the years, it had grown stronger. Deeper._

_And tonight was nothing like her fantasies, it was true._

_Ben was far, far better than she ever could have imagined._

_And she could see the vast gulf between the teenage crush she’d had on him all this time and the reality that was this. Him. His ruthless physicality. His rampant, commanding masculinity, his certainty in her responses and his dark demands._

_Lord help her, but she was lost._

_He thrust into her then, a slow and steady ruthlessness that tore through the thin barrier of her virginity and had her coming apart at the feel of it. The thickness. That deep, aching stretch._

_Then the ruthless, peremptory way he seated himself deep inside her, looked down at her face and smiled._

_"Happy birthday, sweetheart."_

_Rey shattered all around him. She loved him with every last inch of her woman’s body, shattering what was left of her teenage heart and loving him all the more with the far darker, far more complicated adult heart that remained._

_Fantasies were nothing next to this._

_She shook and she shook, and she heard his name on her lips._

_A song she’d already been singing for nearly three years, and would likely keep singing all the days of her life._

_She told herself she accepted it. She needed to accept it._

_Ben gathered him to her, laughing again. It was dark music to her ears, she buckled anew, and only then did he begin to move._

_And Rey lost track of the things she sobbed, or the times she screamed, the sounds muffled by his mouth. He was insatiable, and he was thorough. He taught her things she was sure she could never put into words, so she used the only one that she could remember._

_His name._

_It could have been hours or whole lifetimes when he finally rolled her over for the last time, pulled her knees up high and let himself go._

_And it was her name she heard then, roared out into the crook of her neck as he found his own release._

Rey jolted awake from the dream to find her face wet with tears, her heart pounding at high speed and her body was tense and sweaty. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a memory. A long suppressed memory from the depths of her cortex. There was no more denying her identity now, she knew for certain. Since meeting Ben last night, she’d been gradually shown bits and pieces of her past, his presence a trigger. Some memories had been pleasant...Maz’s kind eyes...Ben showing her the engine of his latest sports car...Ben ruffling her hair...Ben guiding her through a large hanger full of airplanes...Ben handing her a bag full of bath products...Ben thrusting a small jewelry box into her hand...always Ben...his face light with laughter, his smile crooked yet devastating.

Other memories weren’t so nice...bullies taunting her...her parents with needles in their arms...Ben laughing with his friends at her expense...Ben turning his back on her...Ben hugging a sexy blonde...Ben pushing her against a door, his face tight with passion...Rey shook herself mentally, blocking out _that_ particular image.

Her psychiatrist, Dr. Phasma, had told her that if or when her memories returned, it might also bring about physical pain as well. And she was right. Her head felt as if she’d been hit with a bat and her chest was tight almost to the point of unbearable pain. Shutting her tear-filled eyes, she willed herself to remember more but there was nothing else. Just the flashes of feelings and images, many beyond her comprehension. Some made sense while others did not. She spent what was left of the night replaying Ben’s words from the previous evening. 

The love of her life, was he? She was very confused about his claim...but his anguish and elation at seeing her again had felt sincere. And his kiss had felt desperate, tortured and familiar. Oh so familiar—and no less dangerous!

Throwing off the sheets, she forced herself out of bed. She spent less than fifteen minutes getting dressed before making herself some breakfast. A steaming pot of tea and an egg sandwich sat on her desk as she switched on her laptop. Forcing herself to eat, she read up on Ben Organa-Solo. Birthday, family, education, career. No mention of his mother...though Leia did use her birth mother’s maiden surname of Amidala in her profession. As usual, her own google search came up with nothing pertaining to herself. No social media accounts, no images, nothing...as if she didn't exist. 

She read about Ben’s transition from lazy playboy into an intelligent and formidable force in the business world. He’d taken over the already successful family company and turned it into one of the wealthiest in the world despite the economic recession. With a dull ache, Rey looked through all the posts regarding his personal life, hoping to see anything of her in there. If they were each other's loves, like he said, there was bound to be a picture or two of them together, right? Ben Organa-Solo was a public figure, a darling of the media.

Beautiful blondes, young starlets and sexy models in all varying states of dress and undress...on a beach, a yacht, a film premiere popped up on her screen. His relationships were very much publicized and well-documented but Rey saw nothing of herself. She wasn’t in any of the professional photos or even the grainy paparazzi pictures—and there were plenty of those! Ben kissing a brunette on a yacht in the French Riviera. Ben in a heated embrace with a scantily-clad redhead on the balcony of a hotel in Paris. Ben smiling down into the face of a famous actress at the family summer home in the Hamptons. But as Rey scrolled down, through the hundreds of images, she found no mention of Rey. Not her name...not her picture. No standing beside Ben or behind. Not even in the background. There was nothing. As if she were a secret...hidden from the public. What kind of love was that, she wondered alarmingly as a shiver of apprehension shook her.

A text alert from her phone interrupted the stillness of the apartment. Rey was momentarily grateful for the distraction but her face froze a second later. It was Leia.

_Pack your bag and passport. We’re going to the States. Be ready in 45 minutes._

***

Ben knew the moment Rey appeared on the step behind his mother because the world fell away so that it was just Rey. He drank her in. Again. She was slipping out of her coat and scarf, and he couldn’t keep himself from tracing the fine, slim lines of that slender body of hers. Her jeans were snug, making his mouth water, and the long-sleeved shirt she wore hugged her breasts and made him realize how hard and hungry he was for her—even among the bevy of beautiful flight attendants on board the family’s private jet.

And even if she looked horrified to see him.

“I’m sorry, Rey, but Han and I agree this is for the best.” Leia was saying. She had already explained in the car that having Rey visit her childhood home might help her amnesia. Dr. Phasma had agreed but Rey had expected a commercial flight...not a private jet with her boogeyman in close proximity. Her boogeyman. The monster beneath her bed in more ways than one.

She hadn’t expected that particular metaphor, but that was what he was. How else could she explain her wariness of him? This inexplicable fear and dread and toxic terror that encompassed her at his presence. 

And then suddenly, Rey was tossed back in time. It was the way he lounged there, so surpassingly indolent, as if nothing on earth could ever truly bother him. Instinctively, she knew that _this_ was the Ben she’d known. Provocative. Sensual. Even now, with that considering sort of gleam in his gaze that told her he wasn’t the least bit relaxed no matter how he happened to be stretched out in that seat, her body reacted unconsciously to the memory.

More than simply reacted. She burst into long, hot, blistering flames. They shuddered through her, one lick after the next, making her want to fidget where she stood. But she didn’t dare move. She hardly dared breathe.

_“Not just yet, sweetheart. Maz won’t understand...besides you’re still in school. We’ll reveal our relationship when the time is right. I promise.”_

_Then he was hitching her up on the back of a deep leather sofa, two thick fingers deep inside her and she was biting her own hand to keep quiet._

Rey felt both aroused and dirty as the scene flashed through her. Then it was gone again. Her complete memory was frustratingly on the cusp, on the edges of her mind but something kept it there...as if her body knew that she wasn’t yet ready. Instead, she forced herself to take her seat beside Leia, directly across from Ben, as the captain alerted them that the plane was ready for take-off.

He doubted she realized that without the distraction of that lithe, intoxicating body of hers that still drove him mad, he had nothing to do but parse every single expression that crossed her face and every last telling look in her lovely eyes.

Despite Leia’s explanation and the investigation report from the French hospital, Ben remained doubtful of Rey’s amnesia. And if she didn’t remember him as she claimed, then she couldn’t remember what had actually happened between them, and he could paint it any way he liked. If she could remember him, well, it was up to her to interrupt and set the record straight, wasn’t it?

Leia excused herself to the bedroom not long after they reached the Atlantic, leaving Ben and Rey alone except for the discreet flight crew.

“Are we going to just stare at each other or do you want to tell me how we’re in this mess? You say you’re the love of my life...but you never searched for me. And you say that I worked for your family? How did we end up together...?”

“It’s really a very sweet story,” he said. He was sure he saw her stiffen. “You were an awkward little thing, scrawny and shy. You hardly spoke those first few years. I didn’t even realize you were there until you were sixteen. A typical teen nerd with your braces and acne.”

“What?” She coughed when he looked at her.

“Many teenagers have those rough patches,” he said, as if he was trying to be comforting. “But I caught you snooping in the garage once and we spent time together after that. I taught you how to drive in my Silencer. I showed you the fleet of planes the family owned. You can credit me for cultivating your interest in mechanical engineering.”

“That all sounds nice.” She felt a flutter in the pit of her stomach, not an unpleasant feeling at all. “Did I regard you as a brother figure? I mean...why would you spend time with the help?”

Ben laughed. “Nothing could be farther from the truth. I more or less ignored you most of the time.” He waved a languid hand in the air. “I wanted to show off my new toys and you were there. You idolized me, adored me and who was I to say no?” He smiled at her, and there was a bit more color on those remarkable cheeks of hers than there had been before. 

“Are you saying I came onto you when I was sixteen?” She sounded horrified. “And you reciprocated?”

“Good God, no! Of course not! Rey, I barely saw you except for a handful of times from the time you turned sixteen. Before that you were just Maz’s shadow you were so shy and quiet.”

“Ok...so then what? How did we end up in a...ah...sexu...roman...non-work relationship?”

He actually grinned at her blush and saw the reaction in her hazel-green eyes before she dropped them again. But the heat he’d seen there licked over him like wildfire, and his voice was huskier than it had been when he continued.

“You wrote me daily poems, confessing your girlish feelings to me. It was adorable.”

“Poems,” she echoed flatly. “I find that…amazing. Truly. Since my interests now lie in the logistics rather than the creative.”

Ben shrugged those wide shoulders of his. “You still wrote them. Along with doodling Mrs. Rey Organa-Solo all over your little treasure box that you kept hidden away in your closet.”

“And how long did I attempt to woo you with teenage poetry?” she asked, with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “You must have found the whole thing embarrassing.”

“Very,” he agreed. “You were so bad at it, you see.”

“Fine. So you’ve explained how you came to be the love of my life...was I yours, as well?” she asked dryly.

Ben evaded the direct question.

“On your nineteenth birthday,” he said instead, as if recalling a favorite old story instead of making it up on the spot, “you stood before me in a white dress, like a wedding gown, and asked me if I would grant you one wish.”

“Oh,” she breathed. “Like a fairy tale. Did you say I was nineteen or nine?”

“Nineteen.” His voice was reproving, and it was hard to keep himself from laughing. 

"And then, what happened? Did my wearing white turn you on?” she prompted him, a touch of acid in her voice because she was sure he was lying, though her expression was impressively impassive. 

“On your nineteenth birthday you asked me for a kiss,” he told her, sitting back farther in his chair and enjoying himself. He couldn’t remember the last time in the past five years he’d enjoyed himself quite so much, in fact. “‘Please, Ben,’ you begged. ‘I want to know what it is to be a woman. I want you to be my first, everything.’”

“Oh, come on. No one says things like that. Not in real life.”

He grinned. “And yet, you did. Or do you remember it differently?”

“I don’t remember it at all,” she murmured, and he saw that mutinous light in her eyes. His stubborn girl. “Though that sounds a little bit dramatic, if I’m being honest.”

“You were a very dramatic teenager, Rey.”

She rubbed her hands over her face. “And yet somehow all this drama led to a relationship? How did Maz and your father respond to that? I mean...I was the help and you the prodigal son.”

“No one else knew of our relationship, Rey.” His voice was devoid of emotion but inside, he was filled with remorse, with guilt at the secrecy.

“Why was that?” All of her nerves were on edge, waiting for his response. Deep down she knew who was responsible for hiding their real relationship and it wasn't Rey...

“That was your decision,” he told her without a single qualm, watching her for a reaction to what might have been the biggest lie of all, but she only stared back at him blankly. “You begged for a kiss, which, of course, I refused.”

“I can’t say I blame you. I’d question the man who looked at a gawky teenager in a makeshift bridal gown and was the hired help and thought, I want to hit that.”

Ben had no idea how he kept from laughing. “I told you that I couldn’t possibly kiss such an innocent. That you would have to prove yourself a woman if you wanted me to kiss you like one.”

“You felt this was the right approach to an obviously confused teenager?” Rey sniffed. “I wonder if a kind word or two might have been a little more helpful. Or the number of a good therapist.”

“I thought you would run screaming back into your sheltered little world.” He didn’t know when he’d slipped from his fantastical story into something a lot like the truth, but he knew he didn’t like it. Ben stretched out his legs before him and eyed her across the luxurious expanse of the jet. “I thought you were all bark and no bite.”

“Let me guess,” she said softly. “I bit.”

“In a manner of speaking.” Ben remembered that first kiss on her nineteenth birthday. He remembered the taste of her flooding him, and the weight of her thick, soft hair against his palms. He remembered the press of her breasts against his chest and the silky-smooth expanse of the sweet skin at the tops of her thighs, where he shouldn’t have reached in the first place. “You decided you needed to prove yourself a woman.”

“Was there a series of tests?” Rey asked in that same soft voice, yet with something far edgier beneath it. “A game of paintball, perhaps? As opposed to flower arranging?”

“Do you really want the details?”

Her gaze was too hot when it met his, her body instinctively remembering even if she didn’t clearly yet. She looked away—but it took a moment. “No.”

“You insisted we keep it a secret. You demanded I date other women in public so no one would know. You were determined.”

“And you, of course, agreed.”

“Of course. I am nothing if not a gentleman.”

There was a long silence, then. There was only the sound of the engine. The distant chatter of the flight attendants. The slight turbulence outside the windows as the plane flew across the Atlantic.

His own heart, beating a little too hard for a simple conversation like this one.

“Can I be honest with you?” she asked.

“Always.”

“You're full of shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and kudos are appreciated to keep me going! Thanks!


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the great comments, guys. Please enjoy and let me know what you think!

Ben couldn’t keep from smiling then, and stopped trying. “Do you remember another version of events, then?”

“Of course I don’t. You know I don’t.”

He watched her ball her hands into fists, and took that as a victory. “Then my version will have to stand, as told.”

“Let’s say that all of this is true.” She studied him, beautiful eyes narrowed. “Why did _you_ fall in love with me? The person you describe is a naive romantic at best. Clearly not your type if the gossip rags are correct.”

“Love makes us all fools, Rey,” he said quietly.

“You as much as admitted you made all of that up,” she pointed out. “Or you wouldn’t ask me for a different version.”

“Tell me which part,” he dared her. He still couldn’t bring himself to believe that she wasn’t lying about her amnesia. 

She sat up then, so abruptly it made him blink. She unbuckled her seatbelt with nearly leashed violence, and then stood up in a rush. Ben wanted nothing more than to do the same—but stayed where he was, lounging there as if he’d never in his life been more at his ease.

“This is crazy,” she muttered, as much to herself as to him. But then her golden-green eyes slammed into his. “What kind of person are you, to play games like this?”

“Do you really want to know the truth?” he asked her, and he wasn’t at all languid any longer. He couldn’t even pretend. He sat up, never shifting his hard gaze from hers.

“I thought that was the whole point of my being here. All the truth, all the time. No lies, no half-truths. Whether I like it or not.”

“Because you knew the truth once, Rey,” he said, with a harshness that surprised him even as he spoke. He couldn’t seem to contain it. “You lived it. And then you walked away. You didn’t leave a note. Your phone number was no longer in service...you just disappeared. There was no way to trace you, Rey. It was as if you didn’t want to be found…so maybe you don’t want to know the truth.”

Rey shook her head, more as if she was shaking this off than negating what he’d said, and he viewed that as a victory, too.

“Or,” he said in the same tone, with that same edge, “you already know the truth and all of this is a game _you_ are playing for reasons of your own. What kind of person would that make you?”

She stiffened as if he’d slapped her. Did he think that she liked missing a chunk of her life? It haunted her...her amnesia. It prevented her from moving forward, her daily life haunted by a past she knew nothing of. She couldn’t date a man without feeling subconsciously guilty and ashamed...as if she were cheating on some unknown boogeyman. And here he was, in the flesh. But she did not know him. 

She did not trust him.

She did not _like_ him. 

“I think you’re not right in the head,” she threw at him as she started for the back of the plane, intent on getting away from him. “Why would you tell me a bunch of lies? How could fake stories of a made-up past do anything but make things worse?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Ben replied, and even he could hear the danger in his voice. The menace. And it took everything he had to stay where he was. To let her go when that was the last thing he wanted, ever again. “Chances are, you’ll forget that, too.”

***

They landed at the private Organa-Solo airstrip, in the suburb of Hanna City just after dawn the following morning. Daylight was only beginning to stretch out pink and crystalline over the rolling greens that banked the narrow valley. Rey stared out of the window as the plane taxied down the scenic little runway, feeling as if someone had kicked her in the stomach.

She felt apprehensive—yet there was no mistaking the way her heart leaped as the private jet touched down. There was no denying the fact that this felt very much like a homecoming. When the car entered the Organa-Solo Estate, it was more than just a feeling of nostalgia that enveloped her. 

This time when the memories flooded her, she welcomed them...expected them almost. Memories of her neglectful childhood in London with her drug addicted parents, their subsequent overdose, her few months in foster care before her arrival to the States to meet her mother’s great-aunt’s cousin. Sweet elderly Maz with her wise eyes...who’d tried her best to be both mother and father to the quiet Rey. But despite Maz’s kind welcome, Rey had still felt unwanted. She’d felt like a nuisance in the luxurious, bustling household with their well-trained but emotionally-detached staff and acres of landscaped gardens, their water fountains and priceless art not to mention the decadent parties with their famous guests. A veritable playground for the wealthy with the palatial mansion that was much too big for two unattached men. It had been intimidating to a shy, little British girl who’d never had stability before. 

She’d spent those early years very much in the background, going to school during the week and shadowing Maz on the weekends when she was home, careful not to be a burden in the overwhelmingly adult atmosphere. She’d had no social life of her own, no life really outside of the estate as it had been difficult for Rey to make friends. Especially attending an elite and prestigious boarding school that Han was a board member of. She’d been the poorest student in the school full of sons of daughters of CEO’s, hedge fund managers, celebrities and even royalty. Though she was friendly and helpful, she’d remained without friends. That changed one sunny day when she’d snuck into the ten-car garage, and found herself alone with Ben for the very first time. 

Dressed in only a tight black shirt and worn jeans, Ben had looked ruggedly masculine—oh-so-hot—as he worked under the hood of a vintage sports car. Rey could see the grease stains on his face, a crooked smile on his plush lips as those deep-set sexy eyes of his laughed into hers...and then...nothing. Her brain refused to show her anymore after that fateful afternoon. 

_Not yet...you’re not ready._

Sighing in disappointment but grateful that most of her memory was back, Rey glanced up at the staircase and lost her breath for a moment at the unexpected sight of him. That massive body of his dressed in the kind of deceptively casual clothing she knew only appeared to be simple and straightforward but was no doubt exorbitantly expensive. The stretch of exquisite luxury wool across his perfectly wide chest, the way those jeans clung to the hard muscles in his thighs. He looked powerful, strong and devastatingly handsome.

Like a dark prince, she thought, as if she was channeling the teenaged poet he’d claimed she had been. Made of shifting shadows and the graceful lights that reflected from the priceless chandelier that graced the grand foyer, he looked otherworldly. More fable than man.

You need to get a grip, she told herself sternly. Lose control with this man and you lose everything, her instincts fairly screamed at her. Don’t let your hormones rule you, girl.

“I’m afraid the results of the blood tests are in and allow no further room for debate,” Ben told her then, his voice quietly triumphant in a way that made her skin feel shrunken down too tight against her own bones. “You are _our_ Rey Smith.” 

“I don’t find that surprising,” she told him, long after the silence between them had grown strained and awkward and uncomfortably intimate.

“However, I am not _your_ Rey Smith. I don’t know who that is because I don’t feel like her...your teenaged...whatever I was to you. My memory might be returning in bits and pieces but I certainly don’t understand who she was to you.”

“Never fear,” Ben said, his voice soft yet a dark heat lurked there just under the surface. “I can teach you.”

Rey snorted. “Tell me this...if I was so important to you five years ago, why are there no pictures of us anywhere?” She walked towards the spacious family room and motioned towards the wall of professionally framed photos...Han and Ben…Ben in his graduation gowns...Ben with friends...Ben with his extended family...Ben with celebrities and royals but none of Rey. There was even one of him with Maz!

“You were extremely camera shy.” Ben said flatly.

“What about your personal phone? Are there any pictures of me there? The cloud? Your social media account?”

Ben shook his head, his expression unreadable.

“Don’t tell me that was also my idea? Along with keeping our relationship hidden...like some dirty, little secret,” She looked at him with barely veiled disgust.

“It was what you wanted.”

“So you say...but I doubt a teenage poet full of romantic notions such as you described me would settle for a quick fuck in a dark closet.” An image of Ben plunging into her wet core with his mouth on hers to muffle her screams flashed before her eyes, sending shivers of shame with it.

Rey knew she’d hit the target at the flash of guilt in his beautiful brown eyes. “You lying...bastard. How dare you stand there and paint me the instigator in our past relationship? Do you really expect me to believe that you let me dictate the relationship? You—with your vast experience and giant ego—let itty bitty me call all the shots? Please! I am neither stupid nor gullible! I might not have fully recovered all of my memories yet but I do know myself better than that. I would never allow a man I didn’t love to touch me in the way you apparently did. Nor would I ever want to hide my relationship...or push for you to date and possibly fuck other women!”

“Rey—” He reached for her only for her to slap his hand away in contempt.

“You caused this!” she accused, gesturing to her head. “Whatever you did—said—made me run like hell! Away from you, most likely! So please stop lying to me and admit your part in our dirty, little affair!” 

His jaw clenched but he said nothing, accepting every blow her words elicited. Each statement hitting him in the gut like a sucker-punch. He felt helpless, his hands hanging down his sides as she continued her tirade.

“I was nineteen with no experience. I’d never dated or even kissed a guy. You took advantage of me...probably because I was available! Or maybe you were bored! You used me for sex, plain and simple! And you dare to say that _you_ were the love of my life?” Hurt underlied her angry words, her eyes shooting daggers at him. “You are a terrible man, Ben Organa-Solo...a monster! And I could never have loved such a monster.”

Ben watched her, drinking in her flushed face, parted lips and furious eyes. God but she was beautiful! And so right. He’d been hideous to her, especially in those last few months, taunting her with his bad behavior while also promising her that they would tell Maz and Han about their love...all the while publicly dating other women. Hell, he’d even brought those women home, into his bedroom...into his bed and Rey had actually cleaned up after them. Nameless, faceless women...women Ben didn’t even remember now but in his mind’s eye, he could see the mess they’d left behind every single time. Discarded lingerie, soiled sheets and towels...used condoms... 

Worst still, he’d actually delighted in throwing his affairs in her face, his actions daring her to leave him...to resist him. But she never did. Not once. Oh, they’d yelled and screamed and argued...Rey had cried while he’d laughed but Ben always knew she would spread her legs for him again. In his sick, twisted mind, he’d known that she would never say no to him. She would never leave him. Ever. 

Until that night. The events of which he remembered quite clearly—a morning fuck in the tool shed, another fight, Rey crying, Ben laughing at her threats to leave him. Ben had gone back to partying with his friends while Rey worked. And some time during the night, she’d left. Ben had had a late night so it wasn’t until the afternoon when Han told him of Rey’s resignation and departure. 

Why had she left that particular night? Their argument had been nothing new so why had the result been different from all the other times? Ben wanted to know, _needed_ to know. So he could fix it. He would not let her leave again. There would be no more hiding, no more secrecy this time.

“I’m not the same man I was five years ago, Rey.” Ben said steadily, holding her gaze.

“What does that even mean?” 

“It means, Rey, while we wait for you to recover all your memories...I would like for us to create new ones.” He bent his head down so that their faces were mere inches apart. 

Rey could not look away, immobilized by the molten fire in his dark eyes. An emotion she didn’t want to acknowledge churned in those depths. Gasping slightly, she watched as his gaze dropped to her lips for several tense moments before traveling back up to her eyes.

“I plan on wooing you, sweetheart.” 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OMG...thanks for all the responses to the story. I am overwhelmed with everyone's input...I love to hear your comments. Please enjoy the next chapter and let me know what you think!

She ground her sharp three-inch heel into his custom leather shoe, relishing the curse that escaped his lips at the ensuing pain with devilish delight. With a wide smile, she watched him hop inelegantly as he soothed his injured toes with one giant hand. 

“Serves you right, you cad!” She was surprised by her need to hurt him—it was very unlike her to intentionally harm anyone—but she knew that he’d done far worse to her all those years ago. She had no doubt about that...besides she hated his stupid handsome face.

“Rey, fuck—what was that for?” He glared down at her and felt his heart skip a beat at the sheer glee on her beautiful face. Well, he could afford a few broken toes if it brought her pleasure. She could do whatever the hell she wanted...so long as she didn’t leave him. Ben could put up with _anything_ but that. 

“Is this another one of your games? Why do you want to woo me?” 

“It’s normal for a man to pursue a woman he’s interested in, isn’t it? And I am very interested.” His voice was velvety smooth, sending shivers right down to her female parts. 

Rey gasped at his arrogance, and wanted to slap him or kiss him—or both! “You are not! You can’t be!”

“Oh, but I am, sweet Rey. I have much to apologize for and many amends to make. You see...I want you as my wife. You’re the only woman for me and now that you are back, I won’t let you leave me. Not again. I’m not usually a patient man but I will use everything in my power to make you fall in love with me, no matter how long it takes. No matter what it takes.” The promise was there in his eyes, burning hot and fiery yet there was also a deep yearning and longing as well.

“Do you actually think that I _want_ your interest? Maybe I want to be left alone! For you to leave me be!” Rey felt her lips tremble as confusion, fury and—disgust—sprang forth at his words.

“If I were a better man...I would, Rey. I would leave you alone. I would let you find a respectable man who is worthy of your love. But I can’t do that. While I’ve changed from that nefarious manwhore I was in my youth, I remain greedy and possessive. Especially when it comes to you...only with you.” 

Rey was so enraged that she could only watch him with parted lips for several minutes before she could speak. When she did, her voice was controlled and low but no less deadly.

“Look here, asshole. I might have been an innocent nineteen-year-old back when I let you treat me like a worthless little booty-call but I am no longer that—child! I don’t want you! I don’t trust you! I don’t even like you!”

“It sounds like you have your work cut out for you, son.” Han’s raspy voice was full of humor as it broke through the tension.

“That he does.” Leia agreed.

Rey tore her eyes away from Ben’s hypnotic gaze to see her mentor and Han walk into the room. They were dressed elegantly for a night out on the town; Han in a black suit and Leia in a silky gown that complemented her small frame. Rey momentarily forgot about Ben as she arched a brow in question at their clasped hands.

“You both look lovely...going somewhere nice?”

“For such a special occasion...your return, Rey, and my reconciliation with Leia...I thought we’d go out for some dinner and dancing. To celebrate.” Han’s leathery face broke into a broad smile, his eyes on Leia who fairly blushed like a schoolgirl. 

Rey couldn’t help but be happy for them...she knew how much Leia loved Han, despite their long separation and their problems. It seemed the couple had managed to work out their marital woes at last.

“Reconciliation? You and Mother, after all these years?” Ben looked at his parents speculatively, recalling all the fights and make-ups during his childhood before Leia left to work overseas decades ago. Their volatile relationship had been a passionate one, filled with highs and lows—usually within the same hour! It had turned Ben off love for most of his life hence his cavalier affairs with all those faceless women before Rey. And even with Rey, Ben had thought he could compartmentalize her like the rest of her sex...only she’d been different. His feelings for her had been different. But he’d been too foolish to realize that until it was too late.

“We never stopped loving each other.” Leia looked up at Han with all the love shining in her eyes.

“Never. In fact, I love you more today than yesterday but less than tomorrow.” Han pulled her into his arms, tears making his old eyes glisten. 

“Ugh, gross!” Both Rey and Ben feigned nausea as the couple engaged in a deep kiss. They looked away from the intimate embrace, accidentally making eye contact and promptly bursting into uncontrollable laughter. 

It was only for Leia and Han’s sake that Rey allowed herself to enjoy the evening. That was the excuse she used for tolerating Ben’s attentive presence by her side. They attended an invitations-only viewing at an exclusive museum in downtown Hanna City, rubbing shoulders with the upper echelons of society. The seven-course dinner was catered by an awarding-winning chef and the live entertainment provided by an A-list band. But the main draw, especially for Rey, was the exhibit itself. From the ancient hand-powered Greek analog computer to the large computers used by NASA during all the Apollo missions, Rey was enthralled. She skipped dessert—a panna cotta with raspberry gelee—and practically ran to inspect the Antikythera mechanism.

Deeply engrossed in the ancient find, absorbing the accompanying information, she didn’t realize that she was not alone until an object was thrust into her line of vision. She stared dumbly at the plate for a few seconds before recognizing the concoction. Chocolate mousse cake garnished with fresh cream and ripened strawberries...her absolute favorite. The large hand holding the fine china trembled slightly, drawing her eyes towards the man standing beside her. A lock of hair had fallen over his brow, lending an almost boyish quality to his strikingly good looks. She resisted the urge to brush that silky hair aside, balling her hands into fists at her sides.

“What do you want?” She sounded belligerent to her own ears but she didn’t care. 

“You missed out on dessert—”

“I hate raspberry!” She interjected, hazel eyes flashing.

“I know. That’s why I had the chef prepare your favorite...this is still your favorite, right, Rey?” He sounded unsure of himself, adorably so. “It’s been five years so maybe I...ah...your tastes have changed...”

 _Well, damn!_ Had he gotten it wrong? His seduction was not going well at all if her angry expression was anything to go by. Of course, Ben had known that it wouldn’t be easy but so far, he was failing miserably. She’d ignored him throughout dinner and had rejected him outright when he’d requested a dance. She only spoke to Han and Leia, and even engaged in small talk with the other occupants at their table but she kept Ben on ice. When he’d tried to introduce her as his date, she’d interrupted him and called herself the former help instead. Clearly, she did not want any misconceptions made about their relationship. It had hurt but Ben couldn’t fault her given his past behavior.

“It is my favorite.” Rey conceded, accepting the dessert because it did look delicious. “Thank you,” 

“You’re welcome.” Ben was pleased that he’d done something right. He watched as she dug into the cake, his body hardening at the erotic sight. 

“Are we allowed to eat in here?” The question was moot as Rey popped the last strawberry into her mouth and closed her eyes momentarily to savor its sweetness. When she opened them again, she found stormy espresso-colored eyes staring intently down into hers. Those eyes flicked to her mouth and held. Then he was bending down...down...and she felt his tongue flick against the corner of her mouth, licking away a stray chocolate crumb.

“Um...delicious.”

Ben’s gaze locked to hers once again.

Heat. Passion. Need.

It slammed into her. It made her feel distorted. Altered.

He took the plate from her hands but she didn’t notice. Not when she was melting into a pile of goo. Everything inside her turned soft and ran sweet, and she thought she’d never wanted anything more in all her life than the press of that mouth of his against hers.

“Don’t kiss me,” she whispered then, too quick and too revealing. “I don’t want you to kiss me again.”

Ben’s plush mouth was so close then—so close—and that look in his eyes was enough to incinerate whole ecosystems, and there was no disguising the way it made her tremble, too.

“You’re lying.” he said succinctly, and drew closer still, his arms moving around her to hold her there in a parody of a lover’s embrace.

Or perhaps it was no parody, after all.

She braced her hands against his chest, though she couldn’t tell if she was pushing him away or, far more worrying, simply holding him there.

“It’s not a lie just because you don’t like it.”

He studied her for a moment, and Rey forgot where they were. What country, what city, what building. There was nothing but that dark onyx brilliance in his gaze, the riot deep inside her, and her ever more fragile resistance. He shifted, raising one large hand to smooth over her cheek. She could feel his strength. She could feel that leashed power of his like a deep, dark ricochet inside her, flooding her with sensations she didn’t want...and had thought long dormant. 

Still, she was bound by the heat of his gaze, unable to pull her eyes away from the need and desire that beckoned.

“Relax,” he said, his voice thick with passion. “I’m not going to kiss you here. This is not the place.”

“And don’t forget—public.” She managed scornfully.

There was a dangerous gleam in his eyes then. “No, sweet Rey. If I could shout it from the rooftops that you are mine I would. I tried to do so this evening but you stopped me, remember? You are my date tonight yet you called yourself the former help. I am trying to make it right by you, but you seem hell-bent to stay hidden.”

“We have no relationship at present...and I do not kiss strangers.” She said even as she allowed a tiny seed of hope to unfurl inside her. He sounded so sincere and yet...she couldn't risk trusting his honeyed words. 

“We are not strangers, sweetheart. But I can’t kiss you here. The next time I kiss you, I won’t be as thrown as I was on the street in Yorkshire. There will be nothing but our explosive chemistry.” He shrugged, though the hand against her cheek tightened, and she knew then that he was far from unaffected. “And do you know what happens then?”

Once-forgotten images surged through her then, one brighter and more sinfully wicked than the next. A messy, slick tumult of his mouth, his hands. The thrust of his body deep into hers. The taste of his skin beneath her tongue, the hard perfection of him beneath her hands. Salt and steel.

The ache, the fire. The impossible, unconquerable fire.

“No,” she gritted out, wanting to block the memories yet unable to stop them. “I don’t know what happens.”

He dragged his thumb over her bottom lip, his mouth sensual.

“Don’t fight it, sweetheart. The memories...the passion...the need. Let it happen.” He looked at her as if he was already inside her. Already setting a lazy, mind-wrecking pace. “It’s uncontrollable. It always has been.”

Rey jerked her head back, out of his grip, much too aware that he let her. That he could have stopped her, if he chose. His hand dropped from her face and she wanted to slap that deeply male, wholly satisfied look straight off his face. She had to grit her teeth to keep from doing it.

“I don’t know what that means,” she told him, her voice as cold as ice. “I feel certain I don’t _want_ to know what it means.”

His dark eyes were hooded as they met hers. 

“It means I kiss you, then I’m inside you,” he told her, in a voice so sinfully erotic that she felt fire burn deep in her loins. “Always.”

“Maybe then. But not now. I won’t allow it.” She threw at him and stepped back, as if that tiny wedge of space could make what he said less true. His mouth shifted, and she thought she’d never seen a man look so hungry...so predatory...so dangerously attractive.

And she wanted him, too. The sick, twisted cheat. Oh, how she wanted him.

“We’ll see.” 

“Is that a threat?”

“It is a fact, Rey. As inevitable as the dawn after a long, cold night. And as unavoidable.” he told her, all dark intent and certainty. 

  
  


***

Rey awoke the next morning to find a covered tray consisting of scrambled eggs, bacon, buttered toast and coffee on her private balcony that overlooked the majestic gardens. A single red rose and a card accompanied the al fresco meal. Feeling rather carefree with the fresh spring air and warm sun shining, she sat down to enjoy her breakfast. Ignoring the note, she pulled out her phone to answer some emails and messages. Unsurprisingly, Leia and Han had already departed for a romantic second honeymoon somewhere in the Caribbean. Friends Rose and Finn sent pictures of their new baby boy and colleague Poe had sent her some preliminary blueprints of the engine they were creating for an international space shuttle. Her tray and inbox empty, she finally reached for the card, noting the beautiful scripture of her name with a tinge of pleasure.

Dearest Rey, 

I am no poet so I will not embarrass myself by trying...though if you asked me to, I would. For now, I will borrow the words of E.E. Cummings and can only hope you can feel my sincerity. - Always yours, Ben

_love is more thicker than forget_

_more thinner than recall_

_more seldom than a wave is wet_

_more frequent than to fail_

_it is most mad and moonly_

_and less it shall unbe_

_than all the sea which only_

_is deeper than the sea_

_love is less always than to win_

_less never than alive_

_less bigger than the least begin_

_less littler than forgive_

_it is most sane and sunly_

_and more it cannot die_

_than all the sky which only_

_is higher than the sky_

  
  


Rey snorted, ignoring the tightness in her chest as unwanted emotions swept through her. The Cassanova act, no doubt! Did this work on his women, she wondered bitterly. _How many women had fallen for this garbage?_ Grabbing the perfect bloom, she crushed it inside the card which she crumpled in her hand before throwing it onto the tray. One look at the surprised face of the maid and Rey knew that Ben would hear about the cruel treatment of his romantic gesture—if not see it first-hand. She avoided him the remainder of the day, working in her room and having her meals there as well. She ignored every request to join him, uncaring that she was being an inhospitable guest. She refused to indulge him in his stupid game of seduction.

Hundreds of roses of red, pink and white awaited her the next morning. Rey had the staff put in them arrangements all through the house instead. Belgian chocolates arrived the day after that along with macarons from a famous French patisserie that Rey couldn’t help but devour. She did draw a middle finger at the bottom of the empty box before having it returned to Ben. Just because she didn’t like the guy didn’t mean that she was going to waste food so she ate every scrumptious morsel. 

Hand-written notes accompanied each gift and she’d crumpled each one in turn. A set of tools made by the finest craftsmen came on the third day...tickets to a charity ball the next...a one-of-a-kind omakase dinner in the dining room was an experience in spite of Ben’s unbearable presence. The week of gifts ended with a vintage sports car with a huge red ribbon on its hood. That had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

Dressed in a green wrap dress, black tights and matching ankle boots, she went in search of Ben, intent on giving him a piece of her mind. How dare he assume her affections could be bought!

“I can’t accept the car, Ben!” Rey said by way of greeting as she burst into the study where Ben sat behind a large mahogany desk, several monitors in front of him as he worked remotely. 

“Hello, sweet Rey,” Ben leaned back in his seat, his eyes veiled as they traveled over her slender yet curvy figure. As always, his heart skipped a beat at her luminous beauty. In her anger she was glorious.

“Stop with the gifts! I’m not some Victorian maiden in need of courtship!” She fumed at him.

“Are you not a woman? I thought you would appreciate the romantic gestures...flowers, chocolates...a car rather than jewelry.” He shrugged those broad shoulders of his.

“Because—well—I’m not interested in you that’s why! So please stop! It’s embarrassing.” 

“I am openly declaring my intentions, Rey.” He came around to stand in front of her. “And nothing but marriage will do.”

“Well that’s too bad because I don’t want you! I want nothing, do you hear! Not marriage...not love,”

“Little liar...that’s all you’ve ever wanted from me.” He said huskily. “Love and marriage. I was too foolish to recognize my true feelings five years ago but I’m more than man enough now.”

“I’m not one of your bimbos, Ben! I won’t be swayed by poetry and flowers and impersonal gifts! Isn’t that your routine...when you want a woman? Your grand gesture?”

“No. I scoured the classics to find the right poems that show my feelings for you, Rey. I practiced calligraphy to write you those notes...and I’ve never done that for anyone. Ever. Just you.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, readers...the previous chapter received so much passionate feedback. Thank you all so much! I love hearing your opinions as it keeps me writing. Please enjoy and let me know what you think!

_Just you._

The truth was there in his eyes. 

Women had been laughably easy for him, his dangerous looks and wealth an intoxicating draw on top of his sensual charisma and intellect. So the fact that he was putting so much effort with her was out of the ordinary. 

Something inside her turned over, the ice surrounding her heart thawing just the tiniest bit.

“What can I do to show you I am sincere...that I do mean to make amends for all my past mistakes.” His voice was softly pleading, his heart pounding loudly as he prayed for her acquiescence. If given the opportunity, he would treat her like the queen she was to him, worshiping himself at her dainty feet. He wanted her so much that he trembled, his nerves shot as he waited with bated breath for her answer. “Please tell me, sweetheart.”

“You can start with the truth.”

He looked at her sheepishly. “What about?”

“Why did I leave that night?”

“I honestly don’t know, Rey. We had an argument that morning but nothing unusual for us.” 

“Really?” She almost winced at the confusion in his eyes. Oddly, she believed him.

“I’ve replayed our last meeting thousands of times in my mind, revisited every word but I cannot—do not—know why you left that night. Nor how you ended up in Northern France, of all places! I didn’t even think to have investigators look for you overseas!”

“You searched for me?”

“Of course! Dad wasn’t worried because your lawyer spoke with him but I knew differently.”

“Was I so hard to find?”

“I was an idiot, Rey...You’d been gone a few months before I called in professionals but the trail had gotten cold by then. When I couldn’t find you after a few years, I saw it as a divine sign that we weren’t meant to be...that you were too sweet and too much of a good person for someone jaded and twisted like I once was.”

“Divine sign? What’s different this time, Ben? You could just as well assume that we’re _still_ not meant to be.” She questioned his reasoning.

“Don’t you get it, Rey? My estranged mother found you! All this time, you’ve been with my mother! You’d been near this whole time! That’s more than mere coincidence—that was manna from heaven!”

“I—I—don’t know, Ben. I wish I can remember.” She said truthfully.

Ben released his breath slowly. It wasn’t an outright rejection so he could work with that. What he’d put her was unforgivable but he wanted to prove to her that he _was_ redeemable. That he _was_ the man she could share her life with, have children with, grow old with. He would be patient, loving, charming, attentive—he would be whatever she needed him to be so long as she allowed him to be near her. To hold her. To kiss her. To love her. Fully. Legally. Publicly.

“I understand, sweetheart. This has been a traumatic few weeks for you with your memory coming back, returning to your childhood home and putting up with me. If I can ease your pain, baby, I would. Can you try a little bit...to trust me? Give me a chance...” Raw vulnerability was there, making his voice low and raspy, catching slightly as if he were overcome with emotion.

“Well…” Rey almost wanted to take pity on the man but still she held back, remembering the disturbing images that involved them in varying stages of intercourse...and the dirty feelings afterwards. 

“A second chance, please. I’m begging you.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want another chance?”

“Because I love you!”

“So you say…but it sounds a lot like guilt to me.”

“Rey, I do admit to feeling guilty for how I treated you but that wouldn't be enough reason for my wanting to marry you. I love you. Pure and simple. I was a fool back then. A stupid, spoiled, arrogant fool and I am to blame for everything. All of your pain and heartache. Pain for which I gladly apologize for and heartache that I wish to heal. I am man enough to step up to the plate now, sweetheart, and I won’t stop until you give me another chance.”

“Ok. Get down on your knees and beg me.” Rey crossed her arms over her breasts, her expression unreadable as she waited. Of course she didn’t expect a man as cocky as Benjamin Organa-Solo to follow through.

“Really?” He hadn’t expected her easy agreement, so his incredulity seemed like a denial to Rey.

“Hollow words, empty promises...I should have known. You’re all talk.” She made a move towards the door but was held back by a warm hand on her elbow. Her eyes widened in surprise, her mouth rounded into a shocked ‘O’ when she looked back at him. 

Even when he was humbled, he looked magnificent! On his knees, he was at eye-level with Rey, his dark gaze holding her bright eyes. “My dearest Rey, it will give me great pleasure to take you on a date. Please, will you go out with me? I beg of you, please.”

“I’m sorry but I’m having trouble hearing you…” She averted her face and cupped her ear in his direction. “A little louder, please.”

Ben knelt proudly, his shoulders straight and head thrown back with an adorably crooked grin on his face. “My dearest Rey Smith, love of my life, will you please allow me the honor of taking you out on a date? I beg of you,”

Rey moved closer to the exit, putting distance between them. “Again.”

They continued the push and pull until Ben was in the main hall, in full view of his staff as he begged Rey to be his date to the charity ball. Five years ago, the act would have mortified him, humiliated him beyond belief. But not now. Not when his whole life was at stake. He was actually enjoying himself because Rey was laughing. Laughing! The sound so sweet and lyrical to his ears.

With his whole staff watching on in amusement, Ben pulled her gently towards him, his arms wrapped firmly around her narrow waist and his face inches from hers. “I miss you so much...please, will you allow me to spend time with you?” he asked quietly, never breaking eye contact. “Please?”

“Fine...but only out of pity. I will go with you to the ball.” She conceded, her laughter faltering at the glimpse of pain in his eyes before he carefully veiled them. 

“Thank you, thank you,” He kissed the top of her hand lightly but warmly. _Pity was enough for now_. “You won’t regret it, I swear.”

***

With Han and Leia still away, the following weeks found Rey spending a lot of time with Ben. Without asking, he’d set up a nice workstation for her in the brightest corner in his spacious home office. They ate their meals together on the patio overlooking the gardens where they talked about everything and nothing. Books, movies, current events with sprinklings of Rey’s life the past five years as well as Ben’s work. Most evenings, Ben took her out to dinner or social events where he introduced her as ‘the love of his life’, not at all embarrassed by the shocked expressions on others’ faces—or Rey’s. He’d invited close friends to the house where he’d welcomed their teasing at his obvious adoration for Rey. 

Contrary to her expectations, he hadn’t shied away from revealing her background. Rey had been more than a little amazed at his openness to let others in his social circle know that she’d been a part of his household staff years ago, not the slightest bit embarrassed by the differences in their social class. It filled Rey with pleasure that he had been serious in his promises, and was following through with his actions. 

What surprised Rey the most was how much she was enjoying the quiet evenings at home. Sometimes they simply sat side-by-side in the cozy den, sharing a bowl of popcorn and watching Netflix, rarely saying much. Sometimes they would play a board game and Rey usually enjoyed those nights very much, loving Ben’s outrageous temper tantrums at being defeated in a game of Scrabble or Monopoly. She’d even persuaded him to work on a miniature dollhouse that she’d coveted for a long time—an authentic English tea room complete with rose garden. It had taken them hours over a few evenings to finish and Rey had giggled as his large fingers tried and failed to create the tiny glass cabinets that housed delicate tea sets. He’d looked so ridiculously adorable as he fought to complete each miniature piece. The end product, while slightly lopsided and perfectly imperfect, was displayed proudly on a shelf in his study. 

Rey found herself falling for him despite her amnesia...despite her misgivings and doubts. And though he told her he loved her every single day, he’d done no more than kiss her lightly on her cheek. The attraction was there, the desire fairly sizzling between them but Ben held himself back. He respected her too much, he’d said...and he wanted Rey to have no regrets when they inevitably made love again. Not sex but love making. Those had been his words. Still, she found that she could not—would not—give into her body’s baser needs. After a month of romantic courtship, Rey was still unsure about his motives...if there were _even_ ulterior motives. 

It was the night of the ball and when the clock struck the appointed hour, Rey appeared at the top of the grand staircase like every last one of the fantasies he’d conjured up over the past five years.

He’d planned this well, he thought. He’d had the gown shipped in from Paris, had dispatched stylists and makeup artists to tend to her hair and her cosmetics. He’d thought he’d prepared himself for the inevitable result. But it was one thing to imagine Rey, his Rey, alive and well and dressed like a member of the scrupulously high-class society they would mix with tonight. It was something else to see her again with his own eyes. 

Ben had never been so glad of that long staircase that swept down from the upper floor of the mansion to the main level where he stood.

It gave him time to compose himself. Rey moved like water, grace and beauty in every light step, as she made her way toward him. Her chestnut-colored hair was piled high on her head in a sleek up-do. The custom-made emerald dress had a halter neck, ribbons that tied at the waist accentuating its smallness before flowing to her feet. Dramatic eye makeup, pink lips and chandelier earrings completed the ethereal ensemble.

He’d never seen anything more beautiful.

And then she stopped at the foot of the stairs, this perfect goddess with her perfectly shaped and heart-stopping face that made his heart ache within his chest, and scowled at him.

“I’m ready,” she said. She was grateful that she hadn’t fallen flat on her face; he looked so handsome in his elegant tuxedo. How was she supposed to deny her hormones—all her primitive instincts—and not jump the man?! How, damn it!

Ben blinked. And tried to wrestle his roaring, possessive reaction into some kind of manageable bounds. It wouldn’t do to throw her down on the stairs, to lick his way into her core and taste the secrets she still hid from him. It wouldn’t do to rip that perfect gown into shreds where she stood, the better to worship the curve of her sweet hip and long limbs.

“What?”

“I said I’m ready.” 

“So you are.” He couldn’t let himself touch her. Not until he was certain he could keep himself in check. “You look stunning. Absolutely gorgeous.” 

"Thank you. You also. Look handsome, I mean."

Rey tilted up that marvelous chin of hers and he felt it like a bolt of heat lightning, straight into his aching sex. Soon he would be unable to walk entirely, and those stairs would look that much better. He could pull her astride him, taking the cold floor against his back, and he could—

He shook the vivid images away. Somehow.

“Come. Our limo awaits.”

Ben handed her out of the Rolls when it reached the newly-renovated castle, and Rey was proud of herself when she simply climbed out, as if touching him was nothing to her. Then he took her arm as they walked up the elegant steps toward the grand ballroom. He was warm beside her, and something like steel, and Rey told herself her awareness of him was a warning, that was all.

Beware. That was what her pulse was trying to tell her as it beat out a frenetic pattern against her neck. Be careful here. With him.

Nothing more than a warning.

Inside the open-concept ballroom of the converted castle, it was like a dizzying sort of dream. Like being swept up into a jewel-studded music box and meant to twirl along with all the gorgeous creatures who were already there in all their designer finery, moving this way and that across the marble floors and beneath the sparkling majesty of priceless glass chandeliers some two stories above. 

After greeting their hosts, old friends of the family, Ben went in search of sustenance, leaving Rey to find her way to one of the great pillars and stand there, happily anonymous. She braced herself against the stout, cool marble as if it could anchor her to the earth. She didn’t know where to look first. A single glance at the scene before her and she felt glutted, overdone on sensation and stimuli.

She felt out of her element, never having attended so much as an evening party before this. Sure, she’d accompanied Leia to business dinner parties but nothing as extravagant as this. And she hadn’t attended her prom. 

Tonight, everyone glittered the way the finest diamonds did, unmistakably well cut and intriguingly multifaceted. The women were nothing less than stunning, while each and every man was distractingly debonair. Was it the people or the place itself? Rey couldn’t tell. The air itself seemed richer, brighter. Gowns and jewels and sartorial splendor crowded the whole of the expansive first level of the room, a gracious orchestra played classical music from a raised marble dais that seemed to hover as if by magic just above the throng and the sleek marble dance floor in the center of the grand space opened up to the night sky above, yet was surrounded by so many clever little heaters that it was impossible to feel the late-spring chill.

Rey shivered anyway, and she knew it wasn’t the temperature. It was the sheer, exultant decadence. Not a single bright and shining person before her seemed the least bit aware of the unpleasant realities outside of their luxurious cocoon as they danced and laughed and pushed back the night.

“Come,” Ben said, his mouth against her ear and the steel expanse of his chest at her back, and that ache bloomed instantly into something darker. Thicker. Infinitely more dangerous. “I want to dance.”

“I thought you were bringing me food, hm? Besides, there must be hundreds of women here,” Rey replied, her eyes on the spectacle before her. It was overwhelming, yes—but he was worse. He was so much worse and infinitely more tempting. “I’m sure one of them would dance with you. If you asked nicely.”

His laughter was a dark and silvery thing, light against her ear and then, deep inside her, a tectonic shift that sent tendrils of need shooting off in all directions, and she couldn’t bring herself to jerk away from him the way she knew she should.

“I don’t want to dance with them, sweetheart. I want to dance with you.”

Rey wanted to dance with him in this magical place more than she could recall wanting anything, ever, which was precisely how she knew she shouldn’t do anything of the kind. She pulled her head away from that sweet brush of his mouth against her ear, though it took her much too long and hurt a bit too much to break that connection. When she turned to face him, his gaze was trained on the swells of her breasts hidden beneath layers of organza, where she could feel the goose bumps from his proximity prickling to life. The truth of her reaction to him. Obvious and unmistakable, no matter what she said.

Ben took a long time raising that bold dark gaze to meet hers, and when he finally did, his expression was a molten, simmering thing that nearly made her moan out loud.

“I don’t dance,” she told him. Quickly, before she could betray herself by saying nothing at all—by letting him simply sweep her along with him.

He stood there, tall and darkly beautiful and wearing black tie as if it had been crafted specifically as a homage to his perfect masculine form, and she wanted to cry. Sob. Scream. Anything to break that rising tension inside her. Anything to break the hold he had on her. Anything but what she felt called to do, down deep in her bones, and in that deep, lush throb between her legs. “I don’t think I know how.”

“You do.”

“I don’t know what good it will do to tell me that, if I can’t remember and trip all over your feet and make a terrible scene. I doubt that’s the kind of spectacle you want at a party like this.”

She only realized how snappish she sounded when he reached over and traced her jawline with a single finger. It was pressure, not heat. He wasn’t touching her, not really, and there was absolutely no reason whatsoever that her pulse should speed up like that, or her breath should hitch. Noticeably.

“You don’t have to remember, Rey,” he said, his gaze much too bright and his voice a low, caressing thing that did everything his finger did and more, winding inside her and making her whole body clench tight and hot and needy. “You only need to follow where I lead.”

Ben didn’t wait for her answer. He simply reached down, took her hand and led her out onto the floor.

And Rey told herself she was blending in with the crowd here, nothing more. That she didn’t want to draw any attention to herself by causing a scene. It was bad enough that Ben was so gorgeous and so instantly recognizable—she could see heads turn as he cut through the crowd, something that was so commonplace to him, clearly, that he didn’t even seem to notice it as it happened. Rey told herself it was the right thing to do, to go along with him so obediently, so easily. 

But then he turned and took her in his arms, and Rey stopped thinking about anything but him.

Ben.

His sensual mouth was a grim line, but she could see that searing intensity in his eyes, and it made her tremble deep inside. She had no defense against that hand that wrapped around hers, or the one that settled low on her back, his touch burning on her bare skin. She swallowed hard as she slid her own hand into place, over the taut, corded muscles of his sculpted shoulder, and felt the bright hot heat of him blaze into her as if he was a radiator.

Rey felt scalded. Turned pink and raw from even that much fully clothed contact—but all she could seem to do was stare up at him, her lips parting on a ragged breath, his own dark need like a physical presence she could feel as well as her own.

She knew she should have done something—anything—to lighten the moment, to wrench herself away or to conceal how she shook at his touch, at that predatory, possessive look in his dark eyes, but she didn’t.

She didn’t do a thing. And for a moment they only stood there, staring at each other. Stock-still as the dance wove and swirled around them, as if they were the center of a carousel, and the only thing Rey knew for that moment—that endless eternity—was that they were touching at last. After five long and lonely years, she was in his arms again.

_Where you belong. Where you have always belonged and always will._

And then Ben began to move.

Rey felt as if she was floating. She had no sense of him, of her, as separate entities—there was only the glory of the waltz and of his masterful touch, the way they flew across the floor as if they were all alone, the way his gaze wrecked her and remade her with every step. She forgot where she ended and he began. She was too close to him, her hand gripping his hand and her fingers digging deep into his shoulder, and his palm against her back was a revelation.

Around and around they went. And it was like falling. It was like flying.

It was all the poetry she’d never written, step by well-executed step, pooling in the white-hot space that was barely there between them.

And then the song blended into something else, something far more pop inspired than sweepingly romantic. Rey blinked as if a spell had been lifted. Ben slowed, muttering out what sounded like curses beneath his breath.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, but she was too dazed still to worry overmuch. 

Besides, she felt everything. The press of her fine clothes against her heated skin. The warmth of the great room, of his hard, hot hand in the small of her back, flirting with the upper swell of her bottom. The way he held her against him, his strong thigh too close to that wild, wanton place that hungered for him the most.

She was molten and he was steel and she wanted. God help her, how she wanted him.

Ben didn’t respond to her halfhearted question, and Rey didn’t care. The look on his face was stark, almost pained, and she exulted in it. Because her body remembered what it was—what had happened to him in the course of that dance. While her mind had no recollection, her body seemed to remember this _thing_...this inevitable thing between them. She had promised herself that she would not give into the physical but here, now, at this fanciful party of glittering wealth and sensual romance, she couldn’t manage to care about her rational reasoning.

It was as if that dance was inside them now, insistent and elegant, elemental and demanding.

He made a sound that was more that animal in him than the genteel and civilized man he was playing tonight, and Rey felt her nipples go hard against the constriction of her dress’s bodice and her toes cramp up in her impractical shoes. Then Ben was moving again, not dancing this time, but striding through the crowd. Pulling her with him as he went, weaving in and out of the dancing couples and then propelling them down a dimly lit corridor off to the side of the main hall, where framed watercolor paintings featured the castle of the past on the ornately paneled walls while smaller doors led off into other parts of the hotel.

“I don’t think this is open to the public,” Rey said dubiously, looking around with a frown. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be back here. Do you?”

“I cannot imagine caring about anything less than that,” Ben muttered. 

And then he swung her around so her back was against the nearest wall. She had a glimmering moment to take in the nearly savage look on his dark face, and then his mouth was on hers.

And all hell broke loose.

This wasn’t a moment of shocked surprise on the street. This was nothing but need, pure and greedy and entirely, exultantly mutual.

Rey couldn’t pretend otherwise. She didn’t bother to try.

This was fire. This was passion. It was electric perfection. Instant conflagration. And Rey burned. She wrapped herself around him, she forgot herself completely and she let him set them both alight.

Ben kissed the way he did everything. With sheer, uncompromising ruthlessness and devastating skill. He took over her mouth, tasting her again and again, shoving her back into the wall and using it to keep her exactly where he wanted her. He made a low noise as he kissed her, over and over, as if he couldn’t get enough. As if it would never be enough.

He held her face between his hands, and he angled his head, blasting the kiss straight into another level of sheer, dizzying sensation. Rey felt her knees go weak and her whole body seem to shake, and still she met every thrust of his tongue, tasting him and taking him in her turn, each kiss as drugging and impossible and wildly delirious as the next.

She must have dreamed the taste of him a thousand times, her unknown phantom lover, but the reality was better. So much better.

Ben shifted, his hands moving from her face to test the shape of her breasts through the smooth fabric of her bodice, and she knew from the appreciative noise he made precisely when he found the stiff peaks. But then it was her turn to cry out when he covered them with his palms and pressed into them, rough and greedy and infinitely knowing, making her throw her head back and arch into his touch for more of that delicious pressure.

He followed her mouth with his, as if he was unwilling to lose her taste for even a moment, and she didn’t know which one of them strained toward the other. Who moved, who touched. Who took, who gave. It was all a wild, brilliant tangle of sensation. Need and longing and their ability to drive each other mad, like an explosion that kept going off. And off. Without end.

She had to pull away from that hard, clever mouth of his for a moment to breathe, or at least to try. The hall they stood in was still as dark and deserted as before, but the lights and music beckoned just there, just out of reach through that far-off arch, so many people right there who could walk in on them at any moment—

_The way it had always been. Desire and the risk of discovery, all knotted together and hidden away where only they could see it, feel it, succumb to it._

And then she forgot about that niggling thought, about the party and the people and the whole damned world, because his hands were on her long skirt and then beneath it, and he was urging her leg over his hip with those sure, hard hands, his mouth an open fire against her neck.

Rey didn’t think. She burned.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and she gripped him with her leg as he reached between them, and then his gaze found hers. Dark and wild. She felt her mouth drop open. She saw his jaw clench tight as he dealt with his trousers. And then his fingers were moving her panties to one side and the thick, blunt head of his hardness was probing her entrance.

She shook. Everywhere. She shook and she shook and she’d forgotten it, this glorious shaking from the inside out. She’d forgotten how visceral this was, how necessary. Like breath.

Only better.

“I told you,” he gritted out. “One kiss. That’s all it ever takes.”

And then he thrust deep inside her. Hard and deep and true.

Perfect and Ben, after all this time.

Rey fell to pieces, shattering into a thousand fragments at that glorious fit, and only then did he move. Each thrust wilder and deeper than the last. The fever of it, the wild and glorious dance, catching her up when she would have come down and winding her tighter and tighter all over again.

As if all of this need was new.

As if they were.

He slid a hand down to her bottom to lift her against him, pulling her higher until she crossed her legs around him and gripped his shoulders, and then he leaned her back against the wall, braced them with his other hand and hammered himself into her.

Rey loved it. She more than loved it. It was coming home, drenched in fire. It was Ben. It was them.

Again. At last.

And when she threw back her head and came apart again, biting her lip to keep from screaming though her throat ached, he groaned out her name against the side of her neck and followed.

Ben had no idea how long they stood there like that.

His breath came so hard it almost hurt, he rested his forehead against hers while he tried to catch it and he understood that he had not felt this rightness in so long he’d begun to think he’d imagined the whole thing. Her. The way they moved together, the sheer and blazing poetry of their lovemaking that had been the only thing he’d thought about some years.

If anything, he’d minimized her effect on him. Her power over him. The beauty of this wild flame that still danced so brightly between them.

He was already hardening again inside her, and he moved his hips experimentally, but it was still the same. That desperate heat. That wildness like a thirst, that all these years later he still had no earthly idea how to quench. He still didn’t want to do anything but drown in it. In her.

Rey had never been anything but a revelation to him. That hadn’t changed.

But she pushed against him. Then again, harder, and he realized she’d gone stiff in his arms.

“Let me down,” she said, her voice thick, that accent of hers posh and tight.

Ben angled himself back, little as that appealed, and then helped her lower her legs to the floor. He bit back a satisfied smile when she sagged slightly, then gripped the wall, as if her knees were precarious beneath her.

But he felt his amusement fade when he met her tormented gaze.

“Rey,” he began, reaching over to brush her cheek, not entirely surprised that she was trembling uncontrollably. He could feel it like a series of earthquakes, rippling over her, through her. He felt the same in him. “Sweetheart, surely—”

A haze blew through Rey’s mind. Red hot. Like a swarm of angry bees, tidbits of information began buzzing in her head. And suddenly it was as if a dam broke. The locked door in her mind that she’d tried so hard to budge simply opened, and the past came roaring through with vicious velocity.

“I can’t do this again!” she threw at him. She made a sharp sound as if she was in pain, or as if she hadn’t meant to speak. Her eyes were much too dark, and he tucked himself back in his trousers as he studied her expression, as she splayed out a hand over her middle as if she ached while her dress fell back into place all around her as if they’d never touched at all. He found he hated it. “I can’t do this!”

“Rey,” he said again, but it was as if she couldn’t hear him. As if there was a storm enveloping her where she stood, only a few inches away from him and yet somewhere else entirely.

“Look where we are!” she hissed at him. She slashed a hand in the direction of the party down the hall, her face contorted and moisture leaking down her cheeks. “We might as well have put on a show in the center of the dance floor! Anyone could have seen us!”

He made an impatient noise. “No one did.”

“You don’t know that. You hope that. And it’s as childish and immature and irresponsible now as it was five years ago!”

Ben started to speak, to reassure her again, but then stopped. Froze, more like, into a column of sheer and solid ice where he stood. He felt something like light-headed. As if the great stone castle had turned on its end and landed square in the center of his chest.

“What did you say?” He clipped out, his pulse like a clanging bell in his temples.

“I can’t do this!” she hurled at him, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I know exactly where this leads. Me, alone on the side of the road, with no choice but to run away from my entire life. You’re a drug and I’m little better than a junkie and everything between us is toxic, Ben. It always has been.”

And then she whirled and threw herself back toward the crowd, not seeming to notice or care that she was still unsteady on her feet. The mad, elegant whirl was still carrying on just on the far side of the nearest archway, bright and loud, and she lurched toward it as if she might fall over in her haste to escape him—as if she wouldn’t much care if she did.

While Ben stood there in the dim hallway, as stunned as if she’d clubbed him over the head. She might as well have.

She remembered. She knew.

He heard a low, inarticulate noise and understood he’d made it. That it had welled up from deep inside him, from that dark place where he’d locked these things away—

Then, feeling blinded somehow by the intensity of what pounded into him in waves, blinded and yet focused and understanding that was as much the force of his temper as anything else, he went after her.

He caught up to her on the steps of the hotel. She whirled around before he could take her elbow, as if she’d heard him coming and had known it was him by the sound of his feet against the stone, and she dashed moisture from her cheeks with her hands clenched in fists.

Ben told himself he didn’t care if she cried. That the very least she could do, after what she’d done to him, was shed a few tears.

“You lied.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning...possible triggers: cheating explored, mention of cancer at the very end.

“You lied.” He hardly sounded like himself, and he didn’t dare reach for her. He didn’t trust himself to touch her just then. She had finally admitted the truth. That she had betrayed him so terribly he could hardly make sense of it, and in that moment he was so hollow and so desperate he didn’t know what he might do. For the first time in his life, he didn’t know himself at all. 

“You lied all this time. You hid from me, on purpose. Then you lied even more when I found you.”

But Rey barely heard him. Nausea boiled in her stomach as each and every moment flashed like a movie in fast-forward. She saw with perfect clarity the events of that day—their fight, the subsequent make-up sex, her visit to the doctor, the roses, the champagne and—Oh God, she was going to be sick. 

Everything had been a lie. He’d lied to her nonstop since he’d found her in Yorkshire. He didn’t love her or want her. She’d been a game to him, a stupid plaything for a bored, pampered rich man. Cheaper than a whore, made worthless by the secrecy and his lack of respect. Pain splintered through her chest as she shattered. As everything she’d known as true suddenly turned black. As if the past month had been a mere mirage. He had to know she’d remember eventually, and yet he’d spent weeks wooing her, making her love him all over again. Pretending affection for her. The question was, why? Was it all an elaborate ruse to punish her? To make her suffer more than she already had? Her heart withered and cracked, falling in pieces around her.

She clamped a hand over her lips, but it was too late. The tortured cry that ripped from her mouth echoed through the night. Pain cycled through her body, an unending stream of agony.

Ben flinched. It was a terrible sound, as wretched as he felt, and he thought it must have hurt her. He hated that he cared about that. That her pain mattered to him when his clearly did not register with her at all.

As he started toward her, she backed away, stumbling as she did. Oh God, she couldn’t face this. Tears blurred her vision. The image of his hard, relentless face only spurred her on.

Rey fled down the main street. Ben called her name, but she didn’t stop. Sobs bubbled from her chest and exploded outward. She stumbled but regained her footing and pushed herself forward. Behind her, Ben cursed and called out to her again.

She was running with no clear destination in mind. She was nearly there when she met with the brick wall that was Ben’s bodyguard and chauffeur. Snap stepped in front of her and held her, and she exploded in fury, kicking and shoving. Her only thought was to get away, as far away from this place as she could.

She broke free but stumbled backward and fell to the ground. Snap was down beside her, asking her if she was all right, and she knew she was trapped.

She closed her eyes as Ben’s strong hands slid over her body. In an urgent voice, he demanded to know if she was hurt, but she was incapable of answering him. She curled into a ball, uncaring that she was in the middle of the street.

Ben picked her up, and she could hear him saying her name. Curses fell from his lips, and then he barked orders for his car. As soon as he lowered her into the seat, she wrapped her arms around herself and turned away from him. She flinched when he put his hand on her, his touch light and concerned.

“You must stop crying, sweetheart. You’re going to make yourself ill.” 

She was already sick, she thought dully. Utterly sick at heart. She closed her eyes, but still hot tears streamed down her cheeks. Sordid images of that night stuck there in her mind...of flickering candle lights, rose petals on silk sheets, chilled champagne and luscious strawberries...the mood set for an evening of romance and lovemaking. Oh, God! No! No! 

The ride back to the house was tense and silent...and much too brief. She didn’t say a word when Ben lifted her into his arms and carried her into her bed. She curled herself into a tight ball, blocking out everything—everyone.

She wanted to escape. Go some place where it didn’t hurt so much. Through the fog, she heard Ben conversing with a doctor. A moment later, she felt a prick in her arm, but she didn’t react. She didn’t care. And then she floated away, so grateful that the pain had receded. Her mind grew fuzzy as the veil of sleep descended over her. Oblivion. She reached for it. Embraced it and wrapped it around her as she slipped away to a place where there was no hurt and no betrayal.

Ben paced back and forth at the foot of Rey’s bed while the family physician administered the sedative. She was beyond distraught, and the doctor had moved immediately to prevent further upset.

As the doctor stood and backed away from the bed, he looked at Ben, a grim expression on his face.

Fear tightened Ben’s chest. “Is she all right?”

The doctor motioned him across the room and away from where Rey now quietly lay. “Her injuries are not physical. If they were, perhaps I would be of use. Her distress is mental. If it is as you said, and she has regained her memory, it is that which has caused her immeasurable pain.”

Ben stirred impatiently. “What can be done? She cannot be left as she is. There must be something we can do.” The sight of her pale face and her eyes, so huge with devastation, twisted his gut painfully.

“Plenty of rest, relaxation and a therapist.”

Ben nodded. “She has one in England. I will contact her immediately.”

The doctor looked at the other man with sympathy before saying his goodbye.

Ben ran a hand wearily through his hair. Part of him wished she would have never regained those memories. They had started fresh, without past mistakes and betrayals. He’d been sure that she was falling in love with him, this new and improved Ben. The one he’d become for her, because of her. Her love and his love for her had changed him into the man he was today. But all his wooing, all his careful seduction had been for naught. What a change—from mind-blowing sex one minute to cold realization the next.

He’d seen the hurt in her eyes. Deep and horrific hurt. Her distress was so keen that he still felt the knife deep in his chest from the tortured sound of her cry and the memory of her stumbling away from him. If he could reach his own ass, he’d kick it! He’d been a monster, accusing her of lying when it was obvious their lovemaking had triggered her memories. Terrible memories of the terrible man he’d been. 

***

Rey was only vaguely aware of the things going on around her. After that first pass into oblivion, she registered being carried into a car. She heard Ben’s worried voice as he murmured to her, but she closed herself off from him, folding inward.

When she next awoke, she knew she was in a bed. As she looked around the room, recognition sparked, and with it, a surge of fresh agony, hot and raw, seared through her body and robbed her of breath.

He wouldn’t do this. Surely even he could not be so cruel as to bring her back to the place—this bed he’d shared with other women!

She reached for the tears, expecting them to come, but curiously all she felt was an odd detachment, a void of nothingness coupled with the need to get out of this place.

When she sat up, her gaze flickered to a chair by the window occupied by Ben’s sleeping form. He was slouched against the arm, his clothing rumpled and the stubble of over a day’s beard shadowing his jaw.

She waited for the rush of anger, of fury, but again, she felt nothing but overwhelming numbness and a need to escape. A few minutes later, she opened the door and walked out into the pale, predawn light.

Ben woke with a monster catch in his neck and shifted in the too-small chair to alleviate his discomfort. He’d wanted to spend the night with Rey tucked into his arms, but she’d resisted his touch at every turn, becoming so distraught that he’d had no choice but to retreat.

He’d taken the doctor’s advice and phoned the therapist as soon as he’d returned to the Hamptons with Rey. Dr. Phasma was due to arrive this afternoon to speak with her. Ben just hoped she would be able to.

His gaze moved to the bed, and when he saw it empty, he shot to his feet. Dread tightened his chest. He ran from the room in search of her. As he went from room to room, his panic grew. She wasn’t anywhere to be found.

He nearly collided with Snap at the back entrance. 

“She’s in the guest cottage, sir.”

Rey shivered as she eased down onto the soft love-seat and clutched her arms around her trembling body. She couldn’t face Ben now. She refused to allow the memories to roll back in her mind. They simply hurt too much. At least now she realized why she’d chosen to forget. 

“Rey?”

Her name came out cautiously and sounded distant yet when she looked up, the man was standing just a few feet away, concern lighting his eyes.

“Leave me alone.” She presented him her fragile profile, her eyes focused on the ocean beyond the large bay window.

“Don’t you get it, sweetheart? I can’t. I love you. Now. Then. Forever.” It was the gentleness in his voice that broke her out of her misery, her pain replaced by anger.

“You didn’t love me,” she threw at him. He stiffened, but it was said. There was no taking it back. And besides, it was true. This was about truth. Finally, the truth could be spoken because her memory was back. She remembered everything now.

“You were obsessed. You were addicted, maybe. To the secrecy. To the twistedness. To the sheer delight in all the sneaking around and the excitement of all that passion. I know. I was there. But love? No.” She said bitterly.

“You don’t get to lecture me on my feelings.”

“I know what you felt,” she retorted. “I felt what you felt. Too much,” she told him. “Too much of everything. Too much to bear.”

“What about this past month? Haven’t I shown you how much you mean to me?”

“I was nothing but a game to you, Ben! Now that I remember exactly how you treated me years ago, there’s no need to pretend anymore! Damn you! Don’t lie to me. And stop confusing guilt with love.”

“I loved you.” He roared, eyes stark black as they looked into hers. “I have never been whole since.”

“I think you’ve fallen in love with a ghost,” she told him, her voice shaking slightly. “In retrospect.” He made a rough noise, but she ignored it and kept going.

“You had five years to make your lost Rey up in your head. Was she virtuous and pure? Did you love her so desperately no living woman can compare? Was her loss a blow from which you’ve never quite recovered?” She shrugged when he scowled at her. 

“Yes, you were all those things and more! And I loved you, damn it. I didn’t realize it then but I loved you.” he gritted out again, and though he was quieter this time, she still felt it slam through her. “You can’t make that go away because it isn’t convenient for you.”

“I remember exactly how you loved me, Ben,” she told him in the same sort of voice, holding herself tightly in check, as if that might keep her safe from all these truths filling the room. “I remember all the women you slept with while you claimed we had to remain a secret. You said you had to maintain your cover. You laughed when it upset me. Tell me, did you love me this much while you were inside them?”

And for a moment Rey didn’t know which was worse—the possibility that he wouldn’t answer her…or that he would.

“I won’t deny that I was a selfish man, Rey,” he bit out, his gaze like fire, and she didn’t know when he’d ventured so close to her. “I can’t. I regret it every day. But we had no commitment. We never agreed to exclusivity, remember? I may not have treated you as well as I should have, but I didn’t betray you.”

She pulled in a breath, amazed at the burst of white-hot pain that caused when there was nothing fresh or new in this. Nothing but an old wound, a dull blade.

And the same familiar hand to wield it.

“Of course you didn’t.” She wished she could hate him. She truly did. Surely that would be better. Simpler. “And along those lines, I never led you to believe I was dead. I simply left.”

That shimmered in the air between them, like anguish.

If she could die from this, Rey thought, she would have already. Years ago. God knew, she’d come close.

Ben cursed, vicious and low. He sat down and lifted her tenderly into his lap. Then he stopped talking and took her mouth with his.

And this time, there was no party nearby. No parents or guardians who might be horrified by their actions. No one to walk in on them. No one to hear.

This time, Ben took his time.

He kissed her like this really was love. Like she’d been wrong all along. His mouth was rough and soft at once, taking her over and drawing her near, and Rey lost herself the way she always did.

Heedless. Hungry. Needy and desperate and entirely his.

Just as it had always been.

He was the cause of her pain but also her remedy. Her tormentor and salvation.

He sank his hands deep into her hair, turning her into his arms. He stroked her tongue with his, deeper and more intense, as if nothing in the world could ever matter as much as the delirious friction of his mouth against hers.

Rey caressed the hardness of his chest through his shirt, unable to control herself and not certain she wanted to try. She dug her fingers into the gaps between his buttons and pulled, gratified when the buttons burst free and exposed the smooth, hard planes of his sculpted chest. And then she succumbed to that same old need and ran her palms against his hot, smooth skin like red-hot steel. She was aware of his scent, soap and Ben, his devil’s mouth teasing hers to endless wickedness, and the truth of her own mounting desire for this man she shouldn’t want like a near-painful ache low in her belly.

She wrenched her mouth from his and they both panted as they stared at each other, all the twisted toxicity of their connection, all the lies they’d told and the things they’d done, like a thick mist between them, blurring the edges of things.

“Every time I kiss you, I forget where I am.” 

He hadn’t meant to say that. But the truth was, he didn’t simply want this woman. He admired her. He craved her sharp tongue as much as he wanted to feel the wet heat of it against his skin. He had never managed to reconcile himself to the loss of her. He had been made a different man entirely by her loss—and he didn’t know, now, how to pull those different pieces of himself together into one again. If that was even possible. 

She was so warm, so delicately fragrant. He could smell that particular scent that was only hers, a sultry blend of her skin and her sex, and layered over that the hints of bathing products and stylist’s tools, cosmetics and the faint salty air of the sea.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he said quietly, so quietly she almost thought she’d imagined it. But then his dark eyes met hers and held. “I hated not knowing where you were. Whether you were dead or alive.”

The sheer brutality of what she’d done hit her, then. She’d been selfish in her own way, leaving him without so much as a note. Back then she really hadn’t expected anyone to worry about her whereabouts—she’d had no family left, no real friends. Just Ben. And despite all the sex and the lies, the betrayals and the fights...he had been her friend...before their relationship had changed. Despite everything, he still would have cared about her, worried about her, wondered where she’d gone. So, yes, Rey had been wrong to just leave the way she had. The least she could have done was let her lawyer tell Ben that she was all right...well as could be considering the circumstances.

“I’m sorry.” 

“I don’t want or deserve an apology, Rey, but I think I do deserve to hear the truth. Now that you remember,” He cupped her jaw lightly, holding her gaze. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what happened that night?”

“That night?” she echoed, though she knew exactly to what he was referring. 

“Please.”

“You remember that last fight we had.” She looked at him, then down at her hands, threading them together in her lap. It had been a long time ago, that fight. “That morning in the Hamptons.”

His sensual mouth flattened into a stern line. “I remember.”

“It was the usual thing. I cried, you laughed. There was that other woman you’d been photographed with. You dared me to leave you. I told you that this time I really would.” Rey frowned at her fingers as she lifted one shoulder, then dropped it. “I didn’t believe a word I said. Neither did you. We must have had that exact same fight a hundred times by then.”

“More,” Ben agreed, and she thought that was self-loathing she heard in his voice then. She recognized it. She’d heard it enough times in her own voice during those months.

“I had gotten some news that morning and I was trying to make plans.” She lifted her head and looked at him, only slightly disconcerted by his nearness. “And I wanted to see you.”

She could feel him holding in his breath. She pushed on.

“You weren’t answering your phone, or my texts but I knew you were home. Your car was there. So I waited until the staff were asleep before I snuck to see you.” She let out a sound that even she knew wasn’t a laugh, but there was no helping it. This story was like an avalanche. Once it started, it rolled on and on until it wrecked everything. No wonder she’d never told it before. 

“I thought you loved me even though you never said the words. You never acted like a man in love...only a man in lust. I didn’t know the difference between fucking and lovemaking! But I witnessed it that night. You wined and dined her, showered her with flowers, champagne, and strawberries to get her into your bed. You only had to kiss me to get inside me! I was so cheap—the cheapest, easiest fuck you ever had, wasn’t I? She’d gotten roses and romance while I’d gotten...” _nothing._

“Rey—”

She cut him off with a broken, brittle laugh, still staring down into her hands. “I caught you that night. I’d hoped you hadn’t gone to other women, choosing to remain in the dark about that stuff and believing your lies! I had fooled myself but it was different to see it for myself!”

“No, sweetheart, you’ve got it all wrong!”

“How can you lie now! I saw the scene you'd staged! You had your bedroom set for a romantic evening with another woman!”

“Sweetheart, did you see me? Actually see me that night? In that bedroom, in that bed?” Ben practically shook her to get her to focus on him and not on the past.

Rey frowned, wide eyes now staring into his. “I—no. I didn’t actually see you in bed but I saw the romantic lighting and the roses and champagne. And—laughter. I heard you laughing with another woman.”

“Rey, sweetheart. That was the maid. She was drawing your bath. I had just come in because I heard you on the steps.” His expression was earnest now.

“Wait—what? That was all for me?”

“Yes. I waited in the tub for you but you never came. Then I got worried and when I got up to leave, I slipped, got a concussion and didn’t wake up until the following afternoon.”

“What? But...I thought—”

“Shh...it doesn’t matter now, sweetheart. I had meant to surprise you that night. If I had gone about it differently, texted you to come over maybe you wouldn’t have thought what you did. But I don’t blame you for thinking that I was planning on having another woman in my bed. After the way I’d treated you, how could you think that I’d planned a night of romance for you? I was tired of all the secrecy, too." He drew in a shaky breath, loathing himself even more for her insecurity.

"Please tell me what happened after you left the house.”

“I just drove,” she said, uncertain now as she heard his explanation. “Along the coast. I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t sobbing or screaming or anything. I felt numb, really. But then I turned back to the house, packed a bag and headed for the airport.” 

“I made it to the gate and got nervous. Then I pulled out my phone and I decided to call you. But what would have been the point?”

“Rey,” he said, as if her name hurt him. He rubbed a hand over his jaw. But he didn’t argue.

“I was still just your dirty little secret.” she said, almost as if he’d argued after all. If only she had confronted him then, found out the truth...and then what? Would that night have been a one-off or a beginning of something special, something public? Well, it was too late now for what ifs.

His too-dark eyes were a torment, his mouth twisted, but she didn’t look away. 

“Why France?” he asked.

“Maz had left me a small property there...I was going to live there but...”

“But what? What was it you wanted to tell me that night? The reason you’d come to see me?”

“I sold all my assets for my medical procedure instead.”

“Procedure?”

She nodded. “Yes, I’d just been diagnosed with leukemia.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I deviated from the original story from which my story is based off of. In the other story, she witnessed him in bed with another woman (actually having intercourse) but I hated that so much, so I chose to change it. Besides, our Ben is redeemable and there is more to his 'supposed' cheating. Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are much appreciated. If you guys want a link to the other story, let me know and I will send a link.


	8. Chapter 8

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Leukemia...as in cancer?”

Rey moved out of his embrace and went to stand by the window, looking outside for a long time, praying for courage. When she turned around, Ben was watching her, his expression guarded, not a hint of warmth, _anything_. 

“Explain.” He sounded very unlike himself, his voice harsh—as if it pained him to speak.

Rey breathed and swallowed, trying to keep her voice as dispassionate as possible. She explained how a routine check-up had led to bloodwork, a consultation with a hematologist followed by a bone marrow biopsy and subsequent diagnosis of AML, an acute form of leukemia.

“You had all those nosebleeds…”

Rey nodded, slightly surprised that he’d remembered. 

“Did you think I wouldn’t support you?”

She was as white as snow, her eyes huge pools of golden-green on her lovely face. The urge to take her into his arms almost overwhelmed him with its force, but was crushed down by the weight of guilt, heavy and pervasive. 

“I—I really didn’t think you’d care, honestly.” She whispered. “You’d told me time and again my place in your life...which was nowhere at all. I wasn’t your responsibility. I was little more than your—your fuck buddy.”

Her words made something clench in his chest, in his heart. Had she thought him so heartless, so despicable all those years ago? The answer was an obvious and resounding yes. 

“And now...how are you? Are you well?”

She nodded jerkily. “Yes. I’m in full remission. The French clinic I stayed at was able to find a bone marrow donor at the last minute but I did have to be in isolation for a few months. In fact, the first time I’d been given the all clear was the same day I got into that car accident where I met Leia. Aside from quarterly check-ups, I can lead a fairly normal life.”

He absorbed that for a moment. She could’ve died and he wouldn’t have even known it! She could’ve died...alone...without him.

“Were you planning to come back? Before the accident.” he asked, when the silence began to feel much too thick between them. 

Rey hadn’t expected that. She tried to read that closed-off look on his face, or the oddly stiff way he sat there. But either she’d lost her ability to see through him, or he was doing a far better job of hiding himself. She felt both possibilities as a loss.

“No, Ben,” she said quietly. “I wasn’t coming back. Why would I?”

He met her gaze then, and she caught her breath. He looked haunted. Wrecked. She didn’t understand why that made everything inside her seem to shatter like fragile glass.

And he couldn’t argue about a single point in her story. He’d been the man Rey had described in every regard—the one who’d laughed at her, publicly flaunted other women in her face, and he had always, _always_ assumed she’d come back to him. Back to their toxic relationship. As if it were worth saving.

How had he convinced himself that if she’d stayed, she’d have been his? When he’d done everything in his power back then to make sure they would never, _ever_ be together? Sure, he’d finally made an effort that last night but, after months and months of lies and arguments, she might not have believed him then anyway. Not when he’d turned her innocent love into toxic hatred with his careless words and ruthless actions.

Rey had hated Ben—or had despaired of him, and Ben couldn’t say he’d been able to discern the difference. She’d gone to such lengths to get the hell away from him. She’d found herself without family and diagnosed with cancer at nineteen, and she’d chosen to leave the country, to go it completely alone and, never, _not once_ , had she considered turning to him.

Rey had decided that she’d rather leave the goddamn country than play those terrible games any longer, and Ben couldn’t blame her. Not one bit. 

***

Rey allowed herself one cursory glance in the full-length mirror. The white lace dress was perfect for the warm summer night, youthful but appropriate for the dinner party Leia and Han were hosting this evening. Staff had worked tirelessly to transform the private strip of beach into a tropical oasis with fairy lights and exotic flowers. A large tent had been erected with tables and chairs surrounding a large dance floor. Caterers had been here since morning prepping a variable feast.

It had been two months now since she’d fully regained her memory. She was still staying at the Organa-Solo’s Hampton summer home, at their insistence. It almost felt as though she belonged...almost, she thought bitterly. She rarely saw Ben save for Sunday dinners but they were never truly alone. She’d told herself it was for the best, of course...given their history but that didn’t make her miss him any less. She was in love with him. Of course she was. She had always been in love with him, and it was as wretched a thing now as it had been when she’d been nineteen.

Because nothing had changed. Not really. 

Though there were no more sneaking off for sex, he was still playing games with her; toying with her emotions just for kicks no doubt! Sending her gifts—chocolates, a bouquet of fountain pens, flowers, pastries—every day with a hand-written note and texts just to let her know she was on his mind. Just yesterday, she’d been handed a miniature dollhouse with a message saying they would build it together. She didn’t know why he was troubling himself. And the length of which was becoming obnoxious...and painful...hurtful. 

Grimacing, she thought back to a few weeks before when he’d tried to explain to her that there hadn’t been anyone else since Rey. Ha! Yeah, right! She had practically laughed in his face. No matter how sincere his explanation had sounded—work, gym, more work—Rey wasn’t ready to believe him. She couldn’t—wouldn’t allow herself to be hurt and humiliated by him ever again.

But, it has been five years...a small voice reminded her. 

People can change. People do change. 

_Didn’t you?_

A knock sounded at the door, startling her. Breathing out a sigh, she slipped her cellphone into the pocket of her dress and walked towards the door. 

A huge bouquet of red roses was stuffed into her startled arms, Ben in their wake, taking advantage of her astonishment to walk in and shut the door behind him.

Rey just stared at him, her bewilderment writ large in her eyes. “What’s going on here? Why are you in my room?”

He studied her for several taut seconds and then swung away in silence.

“The media greatly exaggerated my love life.” he volunteered stiffly. “Sure I’ve dated and slept with a lot of women but after our first night together, there hasn’t been anyone else. They were fake relationships—created solely for the purpose of publicity. I could have said no but I didn’t want you to claim exclusivity to me. I saw my freedom slipping away to a mere nineteen-year-old and I had to fight it, you see...I’d seen how my parents were and I didn’t want that kind of love for myself.”

And how was she supposed to react to that startling piece of information?

But she didn’t have to think. It just happened. She lifted those roses and hit him with them from behind. He turned, but instead of making an effort to defend himself he just stood there without even putting his hands up to protect his face as she battered him repeatedly. Several buds dropped on the hardwood floor and the bouquet just dropped out of her suddenly nerveless hands. She felt like a maniac in the grip of a compulsive need to kill but the fact that he simply let her attack him defeated her.

Absolutely drained, she collapsed onto a nearby chair and bowed her head. Ben knelt down in front of her. He lifted his hands and cupped her lovely face, holding her still, holding her gently as if she were made of delicate crystal. 

“I am so sorry I hurt you.”

His words were like a balm to her starving soul. “No. No.” She bit down on her lip, closing her eyes, but it did nothing to stop the tears from squeezing out of the corners.

“I’m sorry I didn’t understand what we had five years ago. I’m sorry that you left and had to go through your treatments alone. I’m sorry that I have been missing you and pining for you and thinking of you every day and it still didn’t occur to me to realize that you have taken over my mind and soul in a way that is rare and beautiful and special.”

She sobbed, shaking her head and not really even knowing why. She had longed for these tender words but did she trust him enough to believe him? 

“I’m sorry that I got so fixated on needing to control every single thing about us that I ruined it. I’m sorry that I hurt you, not once—not twice, but every single day when we were together and again after I found you in England. I’m sorry that I let you believe that I didn’t love you when the truth is you are every breath in my body.”

She could barely breathe now, and her small sobs were little explosions firing from her slim frame.

“I’m sorry,” he continued, his own voice heavy with emotion, “that I didn’t understand what love was, what true love _is_ , because I had never felt it before. And I knew that I didn’t want what my parents had—Mom practically broke Dad when she left him...and I didn’t want that for myself. I didn’t want to give anyone that kind of power.” He took a deep breath, his large hands holding her face. 

“But I get it now. What we have is different, Rey. I see how it is the way we fit together, the way we are together, the way I feel because of you—the fact you make me want to be a better man, a better person, you make me want to deserve you. You make me happier than I’ve ever known possible. I am so head over heels in love with you, Rey Smith, and all I want is to tell you this.”

She blinked, her tear-filled eyes meeting his desperate ones.

“That’s not true,” he amended quickly. “What I want is to make you my wife, properly and legally. For no other reason than I do not want to go another day without you. What I want is to be your husband, your protector and provider, forever and always. And I want you to accept me solely because you love me and I love you, and there is no way we should be anything other than together.”

Rey shook her head as she tried to compute what was happening.

“I love you,” he said simply, his hands framing her cheeks tenderly. “And if you tell me I have ruined this beyond repair, I will try to prove you wrong. I will do whatever I can to fix this, for as long as it takes. I will be here, waiting, hoping, needing you but knowing I lost any right to expect you could possibly love me the day I took your innocence so callously.”

She lifted her hands to his chest, staring at her splayed fingers, her eyes wide. “Please don’t,” she groaned, tears in her voice.

“What?” His voice was gravelled. “Tell me what I can do.”

“Please, just...I don’t know how I can believe you.” And she didn’t, but that didn’t stop her from hoping and wishing that he really did love her as she did him. 

“Ask me anything, sweetheart...ask me for anything...to do anything so I can prove my love, my devotion only to you.”

“Why now? It’s been two months since we’ve been alone...” She said softly, with a hint of accusation.

“I know.” He pressed his forehead to hers. “Too long. I was a fool. Determined to give you space I thought you needed but all the while I wanted nothing more than to hold you tight and never let you go.” His eyes held hers, the truth in every fleck of them. “I was wrong, sweetheart. If you’ll let me, I will treat you like a queen...because that’s what you are. The queen of my heart.”

“I’m not, though...I’m just a nobody,” She murmured. “I’m just a poor orphan girl from the bowels of London with no family, no assets...nothing.”

“And yet you are the most wonderful, most beautiful person I know.” And then his smile was blinding. “You’re brave, strong, smart, funny and so full of light and optimism despite your rough beginnings. Look what you did for me—look how you’ve loved me. I changed my life around after you left and solely for the fact so I may be the teeniest tiniest bit worthy of you. Can’t you see that? I finally grew up and became the man you once challenged me to be. I didn’t do it for my parents, for my friends, for my employees but I did it for you. Only you. Just you. And you know what? I like the man I’ve become. I work hard for the company, I help to provide for thousands of people’s wellbeing...but I miss you, Rey. I can no longer fill the void with work. I need you, baby...and I hope you need me—even the littlest bit—too.”

Rey blinked up at him, his words so beautiful, so perfect and all she wanted to do was to believe him...to allow herself a little bit of happiness.

“And there is no doubt in my heart that I love you, and will always love you. And don’t worry about loving me back—I love you enough for the both of us.” He brushed his lips over hers, so tentatively, and it sealed something inside her, filling her heart with all the joy she could possibly feel—and more, because she knew it was just the beginning.

But pride demanded some retribution so she forced herself to put some distance between them. Seeing his stricken look at her so-called rejection made her heart swell. The poor man really did love her!

“I need a trial period. It’s hard for me to take your words at face value considering all the pain you’ve put me through.” She explained.

“Of course, my love. Whatever you need me to do to prove I am serious and sincere I will gladly do. Just tell me what you want and it’s yours.” His velvety voice combined with the hot smoldering look in his eyes brought a hot flush to her cheeks.


End file.
